The Words to Say
by N.H. Arawn
Summary: "In the…l… w'… 'd you… kiss…" It did not work how Lavi wanted. Kanda's eyes went perfectly round for a moment, his hand loose. 'No Yuu-chan, I'm missing words…' His mind whispered to his mouth, but his lips refused to move anymore... 'Was it you… '
1. Prologue

**Hello. This is Niamh, as you might have guessed, again… and this is something a little different than my normal. The truth of the matter is, I have been playing with this idea on and off for a while – ever sinse I saw something on live journal – but I never made anything for it until a few months ago. For a long time I thought about scrapping it, just because it's a great deal different than what I'm used to, but I've decided that different doesn't mean bad; it just means **_**not the same.**_

**I have the feeling that people expect Yullen or Lucky from me, but that's not the case here. If all goes as planned this will be a relatively short excursion into the pairing know as LaviYuu because that was what someone wanted, though I doubt I can make Lavi seme. Ever. **

**It should be fun, dark (I can't help it! It's how I am!) and a bit speedy – if it breaks 25 chapters, I will be amazed.**

**Finally. I do not own D.Gray-man. If I did… we all know Lavi's ghetto booty would be sore by now.**

**WARNINGS: Blood, violence, suggested homosexuality.**

**000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000**

Prologue

A thick layer of fog covered the city like a great blanket, masking the sunset, casting the buildings in shades of yellow, purple, and crimson. Light shined from tile roves, glistening with broken ice and the beginnings of the evening frost. The brownish blood that stained the cobblestones refused to dry in the moist air, not without more heat, so the people that trampled through it took no heed, thinking it mud mixed with old rain water. Strings of gore dripped from the dark corner of an abandoned building, but no one stopped to look at it. No one paused to see the badly beaten body curled in the shadows, grimacing at the hole in his side. It was only the blanket of fog that found him, a feeble sheet of chillness that warned of the freezing night, the rime that would come, that would kill; the blue-white herald to a blue-white corpse in the morning.

The minutes ticked by, blood running more than half freely, before a booted pair of feet turned down the alley, stopping in front of the immobile form. Two faces turned toward each other in a silent exchange of a smile and a frown. The man standing swept back his long black coat, curtain of ebony hair sailing back with the motion, and touched the pallid skin of the wounded man's face, feeling him shiver. Flesh like fish skin trembled under his fingers.

"Why did you go alone?" The words were rife with malice, anger that was more defensive than concerned. As he spoke them the man's hand slipped into short red locks of hair, searching for wounds that would not be there.

"If I hadn't… you would have, Yuu-chan." Came the reply.

"Che." His hands abandoned their searching to inspect the wounded man's side, prodding at it until he could see the torn flesh, ripped in the shape of an unnaturally sized mouth. There was too much blood to know the extent of it, but he could guess the severity rather easily. Left untreated the man would die. Left here he would die more quickly. "If you call me by my given name again, I'll leave you here to freeze." The words were an instinct, not really meant. "Take off your belt."

"Yuu-chan, I never knew you felt that way—"

"_Baka."_

The redhead didn't move when Kanda – as he should have called him – worked the leather of his belt out of its buckle and off of him, sliding it through the loops of his pants so quickly it left his hips warm. His half hooded eye traced the lines of the face in front of him slowly, losing focus, and his bloodstained hands went limp against the cobblestones, head tilted to the side as if in sleep. Violent stinging burned up the side of his face and he gasped, lifting his gaze to the fading light.

"Don't sleep." Kanda growled at him.

He tried to nod but his head only rolled to the side, lolling for a moment while he blinked slowly, exhaustion seeping into his bones and making his breathes sluggish, turned them to gasps and sighs. Cloth on his side felt like salt in his wound but he didn't complain, only winced when his belt was used to secure it, tightening almost enough to make his breath short. Kanda's hands glistened almost black; the shine from his fingers and his hair matched in the one green eye that watched them. Those hands began to fade into the background liquidly, until one smacked his face again, harder, and he gasped once more, drawing his head higher.

"Sorry… I don't think…"

"Shut up and stay breathing."

"Can… stay awake…" He finished, haggard, sunken eye catching one of Kanda's. He could hardly make out the expression on his friend's face and seeing it made him worry – he had never seen the Japanese Exorcist frown like that before. His head fell against his chest and he coughed, goose bumps rippled up his spine, pain searing through his lungs. "I'm a goner…"

"Shut up." Kanda's hand was on his face again, only this time there was no bite to it, no pain. The touch was so warm on his skin he felt his jaw tense, teeth clacking into each other harder than they had from the shivers. "Lavi. _Don't_ pass out right now. _Don't do it._"The redhead blinked slowly, dragging his eye open weakly, his fingers suddenly pressed on the fabric of Kanda's coat. The other man's hand smeared gore across his face when the grip change, tilting his head up at the dark haired Exorcist kneeling before him.

Those eyes, twin sapphire irises burned to ebony in the orange light, matched the growing dark of the evening sky.

Lavi opened his mouth and air seeped out of it, words lost. His eye lost focus on Kanda, his blinking slowed, and he hunched forward, no longer capable of holding himself up. The connection of his forehead to his be friend's jacket was little more than a tingle on the edge of his skin, the hand that lifted his face into the emergent night something wet and warm to lean into. Darkness seeped into his vision and clouded it, blocking what remained of the sun from sight, cloaking the shine from the buildings, the wisps of snow threatening clouds, the glimmer in Kanda's eyes. Desperately he fought the ensuing blackness, but there was no stopping it, not after three hours in a gutter, oozing out his life onto the street.

If there was one thing the street never had enough of, it was blood.

He heard a thousand things in that moment, felt a hundred more: Kanda's breath on his face, the sound of his lungs, the creak of leather, the smell of soap, cobweb hairs brushing the bride of his nose, the thump of approaching footsteps. Cigarette smoke. Warmth near his lips, halting, and a touch that was so gentle he wasn't sure what it was, just on the edge of feeling, like an angel's kiss, lifting the hairs on the back of his neck in a line. He sighed at it, cool air passing his lips into the colder around him. He wanted to lean into it, whatever divine creature that had picked that moment to caress him, but he lacked the strength to try. The pressure was gone in an instant, breath returned, before he lots even that modicum of awareness. The world slipped away, spiraled into the distance, until even living seemed to be minutiae in the great darkness that swallowed up his mind and his reason. There was nothing. No warmth. No cold. Just bittersweet darkness.

The redhead passed out.

Kanda pulled away, licking his bottom lip as he did, and pulled the slightly larger man against him. With effort he heaved Lavi from the gutter and placed him against the wall of the abandoned building, balanced on a locked knee, before pulling him awkwardly onto his back and stepping out into the street.

Evening foot traffic was thick here, but the road might as well have been empty for him. Those that saw the wound moved aside at once, those that didn't were swiftly pushed from his path with either an expertly place elbow or a stealthily maneuvered toe, both of switch left many a near-blind pedestrian sprawled on his face in the mud. Kanda ignored the jowls cast at him, the cat calls, and walked on, his mind focused on the feverish shivers running trough the chest against his back and the temperature of the air. Too much. Lavi was moving too much for the cold.

The moon rose by the time he reached The Shady Rest Inn at the edge of town, lines of silver light sparkling wetly from snow that was so light it had yet to reach the ground. He watched it for a moment before he went in, searching in vain for a star amid the heavens.

He never wished on stars. It wasn't in his nature. But now, when it seemed almost as useless as prayer, he wanted to.

The moment he opened the old mahogany door a collective gasp went up from the people in the common room, a ceramic cup hit too harshly on the warped wood of a table and shatter without notice. He had forgotten the way these people thought – why they had hobbled from his way – and coming in reminded him. A woman in her late fifties was the first to break from the sudden shock, her wiry hands clenched on the ugly gray of her apron, wringing it with a fierceness one might have saved for committing foul murder. She opened her mouth to speak, revealing two yellowed teeth in an otherwise black maw, and hissed out a curse before she spoke to him in a voice as cracked and wrinkled as the rest of her.

"What unholy thing have you brought us?"

Kanda narrowed his eyes at the woman and made for the nearest table – occupied – which he brushed the plates off of with his right arm, filling the room with a symphony of breaking plates and clattering silverware. The woman gaped at him, knurled fingers twisting in the sad excuse for hair that remained on her head.

"Che." He intoned softly, laying the redhead on the now unused piece of furniture. The man closest to Lavi's wounded left side stood so fast his chair hit the floor, hands on his mouth, fat face a horrible shade of green. After a moment he pointed at it, dragging his feet until he hit the far wall. Half the eyes watched the man, the other half looked at the blood seeping down the young man's side.

"_Bite!"_ The call went up like a shrill canon blast, echoing from mouth to ear to mouth again, repeated louder and louder every time. Kanda watched more than half the customers abandon their half eaten meals in a fit of panic, a few dashing up the stairs, other scurrying out the door like frightened vermin. He swept the room with icy eyes before pulling Mugen from the sheath on his hip, the blade's song sliced through the cacophony of shoving people and breaking dishes, and silenced the inn, terror stricken faces turned to him. He swallowed slowly, swaying on his feet, before he lowered the sword slightly to the side of his body, giving himself leave to speak.

"We were sent here," He began with his eyes on the woman whom had spoken first. "Under direction to find out what is attack your city and, if it falls under our expertise, remove it." He motioned with his left hand to Lavi, keeping Mugen in his right. "That is what he aimed to do. From what I saw tonight I can't tell you much – it followed me for a while before I found him, but I didn't see it. If this is something we can take care of, it's different than any of the others.

"I will walk out of this inn and your lives if you want to leave him on this table because you are under the impression that this creature is a werewolf – but I won't fight it. I'll let you all die, I don't care. I will go back to the Order I came from." When he finished silence hung over the room for a moment, as if every person were holding his breath, until someone whispered. The conversations, arguments, complaints, worries, prohibitions – they broke out at once, yells of agreement and denial so loud he thought his ears would bleed from it. This was not what he wanted.

Before Kanda could draw his blade once more, a young woman – maybe fourteen – clamored onto a tabletop and threw back her head, breathing deeply. He saw a boy at her side, around the same age, holding the table steady, she screamed over the din, cupping her mouth with her hands, pitching it low so the sound carried into the street: _"We don't believe in werewolves!"_

The deafening silence that followed was interrupted by a soft sound of coughing, wet and nearly whooping. Kanda turned his attention in the direction of the outburst and nearly gasped when Lavi's left hand went to his side, pressing on the wound. Kanda swore mightily, walking the distance between crowd and fallen comrade in the course of a half second, eyes on the dying man. The girl was beside him in almost as quickly, the boy as well, while the people of the city stood in stark silence, watching this strange foreign priest attempt to save his damned companion.

The girl was too thin, too short, with hair the color of dirty dishwater, sunken dark eyes and a nose that would have reminded him of a mouse if he bothered to look at it. Instead he realized then that his hands were still blood soaked. He had wiped them on his face, on his sword, on the collar of his shirt, and still there was blood on his hands.

Lavi's blood.

"Yuu…?" An eye blinked up at him, slatted, the shadowy emerald of its iris stopping on Kanda's face. The Japanese Exorcist pulled the redhead's hand from his side, sticky from holding on so long, and stopped short when the hand grabbed his fingers, stronger than it should have been. With lips parted in surprise he stiffened, a sick cold feeling slipping up his spine to wrap around his brain, freeze the pit of his stomach in black ice, liquefy his heart. He was never this worried for anyone, but this wasn't anyone, it was Lavi. Somehow, that made the broken sound of his voice different.

"Che." He responded without thinking. He felt the hand clamp on him, cutting off his circulation, and slipped his palm forward enough to return the hold. His heart lurched in his chest for a moment before the icy fingers began to twitch with strain, fingernails biting into flesh. "You're fine."

Lavi coughed for a moment and his jaw started to quiver, teeth rattling against each other. His words were halted by it, but he attempted to bite them out one at a time, breathing slowly. "In the…_l_… w'… 'd you… kiss…" It did not work how he wanted. Kanda's eyes went perfectly round for a moment, his hand loose. _No Yuu-chan, I'm missing words…_ His mind whispered to his mouth, but his lips refused to move anymore. The world was spinning again, sinking away, and the touch of a hand on his forehead did not stop his eye from falling shut. In the darkness he felt a warm rush of air against his face, like before, and gasped at it, the pain in his side forgotten. There was nothing but that gentle heat, spreading slowly across his lips, down his throat, and across his oddly tight chest.

_Was it you?_

--

**For the record... I dunno if he kissed him the first time. .**


	2. Heartsick and Threadbare

**Here we have it, chapter one. It's not as dark as the prologue, but I'm trying to keep it about the same diction level. It's more difficult than it seems.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own D.Gray-man. If I did… Kanda would totally misplace every shirt he owns.**

**WARNING: Future homosexuality. Cursing.**

-- -- --

Part One: Heartsick and Threadbare

It had been two weeks since their return to Headquarters, and Kanda had not gone to see the redhead in all that time. He couldn't make himself.

The mission had been simple. Go. Kill the akuma. Find the Innocence. Come back. The same as always. Somehow, it had turned into something more complicated than that.

Lying on his back in his room, Kanda stared apathetically up at the ceiling, running the events through his mind's eyes for what seemed like the thousandth time since they had returned. It was how he had come to spend his mornings, actions haunting him relentlessly. The part that bothered him was not that Lavi had been hurt, or that the monster he killed had been composed of flesh and not metal, it was what had happened in that inn, before the questioning faces of more than forty people.

"_In the…l… w'… 'd you… kiss…"_ The words had left him staring for a moment, but he had recovered when Lavi threatened to lose consciousness without further warning. He filled in the blanks in that time and realized, momentarily, that it was Lavi's potential last request – a request that he was supposed to fulfill. A kiss. The last thing his best friend would ever ask him for, facing his death, was a kiss.

His hands came up and blocked the dark room from sight, resting over his deep blue eyes with all of their weight. He couldn't see, nor could he block out the physical memory of what he had done, so he let his arms down, looking once more at the stone ceiling over him. The scene played on in his head.

Standing before all of those observing eyes, dripping in gore, he had leaned forward and kissed the redhead, just like he had asked, astounded at the soft brush of cool lips on his, the electric serge of feeling in his throat. Even now, looking back, his fingers touched his mouth in memory. He had _felt_ something in that moment, something heated and wonderful, something that made his head feel fuzzy and his knees feel weak. His self proclaimed best friend, the most annoying person he knew next to Allen Walker, had been the person he unwittingly gave his first kiss to, and he didn't want to take it back.

He couldn't forget about it.

With a low growl he sat up and moved laboriously to his dresser. The sun was peeking in his window and he had not risen this late in ages; he felt stiff from lying around thinking so much, sick with worry. His ebony hair fell across his back a little more loosely that it should have, tickling, and it brought an idea to his mind, something he should have thought of sooner. He would shower, meditate, and eat. He would go about his day as casually as he could, as always, and then change it before dinner. He would wander the halls until he found a certain other Exorcist's room – one that he had known for most of his life and come to trust far more than the others – and then he would seek out the person who lived there, because right now he needed someone else to think for him. Thinking left him breathless.

He had just pulled a fresh shirt from his top drawer when a knock sounded at his door. He made an unpleasant grunt at it – out of habit – and put the shirt down, scowling. His eyes flicked to the wooden portal and lingered there while he put down his irritation. There was no use starting the day on the wrong foot.

"What?"

Silence returned to him for a moment. His shoulders slumped.

"Kanda-kun?" A young woman's voice said at last, softly. He smiled crookedly at it, left side of his upper lip raised over his teeth. He was an idiot to think he'd have to go to her when it was in her nature to seek out the wrongs in her world and right them. The hollow sound of her voice chimed again, still quietly. "It's almost noon and… you haven't come out and I'm just…"

The door opened. He wordlessly turned away from the small Chinese girl standing before him, short dark hair parted on the side, gray eyes worried almost sickeningly. She took the unspoken invitation, stepping into his room as if she had done it more times than she could count; as many times as a certain high ranking member of the Vatican had come to visit. The door shut behind her.

"You weren't at breakfast."

"I wasn't hungry."

She frowned at him, deeply, and leaned against the doorframe with a sigh. "He's awake."

"He was awake yesterday."

"You aren't going to see him?"

Kanda did not answer at once, electing instead to sit on the edge of his unmade bed first, eyes on the stone of the floor. He hadn't thought enough. He had thought too much. He needed to stop _feeling_ before he had this conversation, but she wasn't giving him a chance. Maybe that was better.

"Kanda?" She didn't know what was going on.

He shook his head, strings of hair falling down his shoulders like shredded ebony curtains. For once he did not push them away. They pooled around him and he ignored their existence, indifferent to his falling ponytail. "I… could hear your advice." He said at last, not looking up. If he looked up, he would speak without thinking.

Lenalee tilted her head to the side, frowning. "I can count the number of times you have asked for advice on one hand, Kanda. What is it?"

"When we were gone…" He was shaking and the realization terrified him. "He made his last request of me."

"Lavi?"

Kanda nodded. "Stupid brat."

Lenalee shifted on her feet, but did not speak. Her fists spread out and pressed the fabric of her skirt a little across her thighs, as if she were not paying attention. That always made things easier for Kanda.

"He asked me to kiss him."

She gasped and her hands clamped on her clothes. "Did you do it?" That wasn't the question she should have asked.

He didn't look at her, or falter, he simply lifted his fingers to his lips and nodded. They burned. Like cinnamon and honey and something bitter had been smeared across his lips; they burned. Why did they burn? "And I… I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know what to do. Because I…" He stopped himself short, biting his bottom lip. A hand came to rest on his shoulder and he leaned into it, unable to will himself to shrug it off like normal. It was enough to ease the shaking in his hands a little, but he continued to breathe hurriedly, eyes unfocused. The gray stone of the floor made him forget how late it was. "I want to do it again." She couldn't have heard him say it, they were words composed of nothing but air.

It was the first time he had admitted it, out loud or otherwise, and he closed his eyes to it. The hand on his shoulder felt like the anchor between himself and sanity.

"Kanda-kun," Lenalee's voice was so very close to his ear, but he dared not look at her. If he looked, he would do something stupid. He was smart enough to know his limits. "Are you saying… that you kissed Lavi?"

The Japanese man slowly, shaking, nodded.

"And you liked it?"

Another almost shy nod.

"What bothers you about it?" Lenalee asked as lightly as she could. "He asked you to."

Kanda made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Che. He's supposedly my best friend. The last I remember, best friends do not kiss."

"He asked you to."

"He's an idiot."

Lenalee laughed. "I think you're blowing this out of proportion, Kanda."

His expression flashed a humorless smile for a moment before falling again, his eyes still averted. For her to get it, for her to understand, he would have to tell her the truth. The truth that had not yet spoken to anyone.

"I liked it. I _want_ to repeat it, Lenalee. I don't like people. I don't… I'm not his friend because I enjoy his antics. I shouldn't—"

She shushed him, giving his shoulders a little squeeze. "If he _asked_ you then he must want _you_."

Kanda barked out a harsh laugh at that. It was a pained sort of sound, something hard and broken, lacking any sort of amusement beyond the thought of how ridiculous she was being. His face matched the expression in the dim light, but his eyes betrayed him. There was a tiny flicker, an almost nonexistent little twinkle, a tiny wink of something besides what he seemed to feel. Lenalee could see that spec of hope and smiled at him, because she knew what could come of it.

He stood up, shrugging off her arm, and moved back to his dresser, refusing to look at her, or anything else that might make him see. He did not want to see. There were too many things on the line to just open his eyes and make a gamble. "I'm a man, last I looked at myself." He said to the wall. "That skirt-chaser doesn't give a damn about men. Even if he did I… it's just I…" He paused, setting his jaw, and turned to face her. His hardened expression did not even make her flinch. It was hard for him to speak the words that demanded to be said, to think them, but it was easier now that he had let a part of what he felt show without her killing him. "It's a sin. Everywhere I look, his culture, our Order, it tells me that I am wrong for wanting to do that. It tells me that what could have been his last act in this life was against God, and that _feeling_ something because of it makes me—"

"Kanda." Her eyes were perfectly round, her voice flat. He could not help but stare at her when she made an expression like that. "Have you been thinking about this since you got back?"

He nodded.

"Do you care?"

"What?"

"Do you care that the Order would frown on it? Or do you still want to?"

He was silent for a moment, blinking, and then the swish of his hair when he cast his face down broke the stillness. "I don't really care about the Order's opinion, I just… I've never liked to touch anyone, not you or any other girl, no men either. And he's _Lavi…_" The way his voice tapered away into stillness worried him.

"I think you're looking for problems, Kanda-kun. If you don't care about the Order's opinion how can you care that it's supposed to be a sin? Maybe…" To his horror she smiled sweetly at him and settled more surely on his bed, as if she were perfectly fine touching one of his most intimate pieces of furniture. He didn't specifically care if she sat on his bed; he simply cared if she did it with that scheming, knowing look on her face, short hair falling almost over her eyes. "I want you to really _think_ about this for a moment, ok? Think about it and tell me, why are you bothered by it? Don't repeat yourself, either. I want a brand new, well thought out reason for you to be this worried about things."

He scowled at her, but kept his mouth shut. Leaning heavily on his dresser, which was so old it creaked under his weight, he looked down at his feet, wiggling his toes as if the movement might make contemplating easier. It didn't. His pale digits inspired nothing but silence. He took the first thread that came to mind in an effort to stop the fear building in his gut that he really didn't _have_ a reason. "I keep thinking…and… the more I do… it's…. he's… I just _know_ that he'd want to…and I flatly refuse to…_damn it._" A detailed image filled his mind then, one that he had tried to put down when it first came up, and he shook his head to be rid of it – the movement did nothing. He could still imagine Lavi looking up at him with an expression of feigned shyness, lips drawn into that expression he always used on women, looking so perfectly wanton and angelic that he couldn't stand it to just be imaginary.

Kanda laughed at himself and looked up at the Chinese girl, crooked smile on his face. "I've got it bad, haven't I?"

"Yeah," She chuckled at him. "You do."

"Suggestions?"

She shrugged with a gentle sigh, kind eyes returning his smile even though her lips did not. "I'll talk to him – without letting anything out – you just… act normal."

He nodded. "I can do that."

"Good." She stood up, gave her best impression of an Allen Walker smile, and tilted her head to the side girlishly. "Now go shower. It's not like you to sit around until noon before you come see us. And stop smirking at me, he'll know something is up if he sees it."

His face fell into his customary glare – perhaps a bit more intense than normal. She giggled at the attempt. "Thank you, Lenalee." He said the words a hair less quietly than the rest of it.

"You're very, very welcome."

* * *

The apprentice Bookman could not sleep for the life in him. He reclined heavily on the pillows that held him up, looking out the window at the noon light, frowning. He had to turn his head away from the door to see out of it properly, and that left him blind to whoever walked in – something that he didn't like. In situations like these he wanted two eyes that worked independently of one another, not just one. That way he could enjoy the clouds struggling with their snowy burdens and the thick layer of frost on the ground below, which made him think of brownies topped with powdered sugar for some reason, and simultaneously make sure no one came in to murder him.

Someone knocked and he cursed at the tightening of his chest and stomach muscles beneath his bandages. They hurt worse than wounds he could remember getting, but the Matron didn't seem too concerned with them, not that she ever seemed concerned for anything that wasn't completely unimportant and survivable. These wounds though, when he saw his wrappings changed, looked terrible to him, and he had seen a lot of wounds in war, more than most surgeons did, more than most soldiers. It scared him, a little. He didn't want them to scar, but he knew it was likely. The flesh from under his ribcage to his hipbone was more or less gone on the left side, with a secondary, smaller, shallower bite just above it. Knowing that they looked like normal wounds reassured him, but not to the point of instinctually smiling through the pain.

He plastered a smile on his face and turned to the door, because no one wanted to see him thinking about his wounds or feeling morose about his window. "Yes!" He called in a sing-song voice, as chipper as always. The door creaked open and Lenalee admitted herself grinningly, her face spilling a thousand secrets that she could never hide, but telling none of them in detail. She knew something juicy that she wasn't going to talk about directly – she wasn't just there to see him.

"How are you feeling?" She asked as she took up a seat beside his bed. Her hands fisted on her knees. She was dying to get it out.

"Sore." He answered honestly. "And hungry. Whatever bit me had fangs like razorblades. I won't be leaving for a little bit." He tried to laugh but it didn't work, not when he winced.

"Has anyone else come to see you?" She asked it as if she knew the answer.

"Nope. Panda's out with the flu, Allen's on a mission, Miranda doesn't visit alone so…"

"Mmhmm… what about Kanda?"

"Yuu-chan is Yuu-chan. He wouldn't visit me if I was here for a year."

"Right…"

He frowned at her, eyebrows pushed together. He was missing something. He _knew_ he was missing something, but he couldn't imagine what it was. So he took a shot in the dark. "It gets a little lonely with just me and the window, but I'll live." And he cocked his best smile at her, the ones he saved for the girls he wanted to knock over and—

She giggled at him. Purposely. "Well, I guess that's good. You'll get better rest the fewer people who see you. But…" She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and crossed her legs. Oh yes, there was something going on. Lenalee hadn't done that lovely head tilt since Cross disappeared, and even then it was only to get what she wanted from him. "Can I ask you a personal question, Lavi?" She was talking so lowly, her tongue on her lower lip, her shoulders pushed back – wounded or not he _knew_ she was up to something. The signals were unending. But still, he couldn't just take her physicality into regard and nothing else, that had gotten him in trouble before.

"What kind of question?"

"Well…" A pregnant pause. "Do you… like anyone?"

He was going to die. Lenalee Lee, the untouchable, the uncatchable, had just asked him if he liked anyone. Lavi's blood alighted in his veins at the idea. The signals! The words! She was _hitting_ on him! He breathed in a gradual breath and sighed it out just as softly, fighting for words.

Before he could speak, however, he remembered the fleeting feeling of lips on his in the alleyway and paused – then shook the thought from his mind. It didn't work though. That kiss was perhaps the most wonderful thing he could remember, the slowness of it, the warmth, the fearlessness, and even if this was Lenalee, even if it was a woman between ten and forty, he couldn't just forget that. It wasn't fair. Because those lips that had been so lovely, even if he didn't remember who or what or when they had found his. If he kissed her in this moment he would compare them. She wouldn't be able to compete with them he knew, because that was the single most wonderful kiss of his life, and she had never kissed anyone. It wasn't fair.

And, for some inexplicable reason, even if he never found out who kissed him, he had to hold on to that for just a little longer. It had meant something when it happened. It still did.

"Lavi?"

He tugged his smile back up from where it had fallen, lips curling almost lecherously. "I don't like anyone." He said a bit too quietly. "And I don't think I can try to right now. Maybe after I forget…" _Oops._

"Forget?"

He laughed awkwardly. "Eh… er… when I was on that last mission I… kinda met a girl and… I can't get 'er outta my head. I… think." He saw the light in her eyes fade a little and a rush of guilt went through him. That had come out different than he wanted. He cleared his throat to keep her from talking. "I mean! It's hopeless and I understand that but… it wouldn't be fair to try liking someone when I'm thinking about… that…"

"You seem very bothered by whoever she was."

"Er… yeah. I um… don't actually remember what she looked like."

"Really?" Lenalee's legs uncrossed and she bounced a little, eyes twinkling. That wasn't the reaction he had predicted.

He shook his head. "No. But Yuu-chan must have seen her, I think. I don't know when it happened, but at some point between him finding me and waking up here, there was… maybe I should ask him about it." He suggested with an unfitting turn of his head. Not being able to remember when it happened or who had done it, not knowing if he'd ever feel that warmth on his face – it was all so stupid. Logic told him to forget it and get some, but he couldn't do that right now. He couldn't ignore that memory.

Lenalee nodded slowly. "Then… you want to find… the person who… kissed you?"

His eye went suddenly wide. "I never thought about finding her but… it would be…" His eye narrowed. "I never said she kissed me."

Lenalee made the face that said she was lying. "Oh, I just assumed it was a kiss. There's no other way that you'd make a face like that, Lavi-kun." She smiled a sweet smile, the kind of smile that she only used when she was actually happy, and sighed a little. "But what makes you think it was a girl?"

"Why would a guy kiss me?"

"Maybe you asked one."

"Haha. I'd die before I would."

"But what if it was? I mean… in theory."

"What are you getting at?"

"Absolutely nothing."

He sighed, having never thought about it. Those lips though, how they had _felt_… "If that was a guy then… I dunno. I s'pose I'd want to ask him why he kissed me." He chuckled, lifting his right hand to push through his hair. It was in disarray, so his hand didn't mess it up anymore than it already was. "Doesn't make one scrap of difference about how nice it was!" He forced himself to laugh through it while he studied Lenalee's expression.

A soft, honest smile.

What did she know? Was she hitting on him? Or was this something different?

"Well, Lavi…" She stood up and brushed her skirt with her fingers, black material flicking with the motion. "I should go give my brother coffee. You get some rest."

"I will Lenalee." Lavi smiled at her. There were questions that he wanted to ask but he withheld them, knowing that whatever he was missing would be explained when he was better. If she liked him, if there was someone else, if she were just taking a survey of sexual preferences, he didn't know. He would have to wait and see. "Oh!" He called after her, a more pressing question coming to mind. She turned on heel and looked at him quizzically. "Could you get someone to bring me food?"

"What kind?"

"Anything. Maybe… something meaty. And brownies."

She smiled at him and nodded. "I'll send something."

* * *

"This is fucking horse shit!"

"K-Kanda…"

"The Goddamn _retard_ doesn't _remember?!_ How could he _forget?!_ It's not everyday that I fucking kiss someone! I'm going up to his room to kill him _right_ now." There was the sound of a sword leaving its sheath and a growl, then the sword going back again. The livid Japanese man kept talking regardless, unfazed by the silencing of his sword's ring. "But then I'd have to _see_ him. I can't see him. Why the hell am I like this?! I can't even _look_ at him I just know that I'll—"

"Yelling won't make it better!" Lenalee said loudly, her clipboard meeting the side of his head rather violently. He fell back, holding his head in one hand, and glared at her dangerously, not that he meant the expression more than normal. The Chinese girl ran a hand through her hair as if to flip it out of the way, but it wasn't as long as she seemed to think it was. It looked strange, but not odd enough to make his glare fade at all. "I _know_ that you think this is impossible but it's _not!_ We can come up with something. And until we do," She clamped her clipboard to her chest and sighed, watching him rub at his skull and the slowly reddening bruise she had left on his skin. "You need to calm down and act normally. If he really doesn't remember then you'll just have to show him that you did it. _Slowly._"

"Che. How the hell do you think I should do that?" He dropped his hand from his forehead and gave his bangs one last lift, a touch that kept them for his skin for a moment before he jerked his head to the side and they fell again, exactly as they were before. The contact was not what had caused the initial brush of his hand, but rather the puce bruise beneath.

"Well, let's start simple." Lenalee said through her teeth. "Have you come to terms with… everything?"

Kanda sighed and sat himself down on the edge of his bed. Even after lunch he couldn't stand the thought of socializing – not that he really ever could – or training with his mind so full, so he just snuck back into his room and waited for Lenalee. The window had provided a small amount of entertainment in the form of snow flurries and ice crystals while he waited for everything to fall apart, and he managed to get changed, fix his hair, and attempt to mediate. From the outside, he most likely just looked as if he were having an off day and wanted to be left alone. It wasn't that far off, really. He had survived two weeks without letting anyone know what had happened, this was just the black day among the red.

But now, at least, he knew what he felt to a higher degree. "I have." He said softly. _I don't understand it, but I know how I feel._

"Good!" Lenalee chimed at him, and pushed her clipboard onto his dresser before she turned back with a little flick of her ankles. "First, I want you to pretend that I'm Lavi and—"

Kanda groaned and threw himself back across his bed.

"Kanda-kun! That isn't going to help! If you really want—"

"Shut up." He pushed himself back up again, but fell when the clipboard once again came into swift contact with his forehead. "Mn!" Was his only response. He knew he would find himself bruised and beat with that little flat piece of metal if he told her to shut up, but it was instinct, he couldn't stop himself. Gradually he pushed her weapon away and sat up again, looking at her with reluctant eyes. "Fine. I'll pretend you're that _baka usagi_. Just… don't hit me for it."

Lenalee smiled and put her clipboard aside. She hadn't thought he'd go through with it so easily, but it proved his willingness, and his uncertainty. "Ok. I'm going to sit on the bed and you walk in. We'll see how that goes first." She offered with a small, almost encouraging pat on his shoulder. He scowled as he pushed himself up and moved across his room. She seated herself so her feet were by his pillow, that way her face was in the proper position, and she looked into the wall. He stood for a second, looking at her watch the stone, and wondered what on Earth he was going to do.

_Fuck it._

He sat on the floor.

"Kanda."

"Yuu-chan." He bit out, not looking at her, and tried to ignore her little gasp at the name. "If… we're going to do this right."

She smiled at him far too brightly and tilted her head to the side. "Alright… Yuu-chan." And she giggled. It was a light sound, something tinny and bright and it made him want to do something violent, something bloody and unhappy. It wasn't that he didn't like laughter, it was simply the fact that she had laughed at his expense, like so many people did, and it angered him. With a slow, lingering sigh he breathed out his anger and tried to be calm, to think the way he had in the darkened alleyway – to think with his mind and not with his heart.

He ran a hand through his ponytail and stood again, his mind set. He settled himself and swallowed, moved his jaw forward, closed his eyes, breathed in. It wasn't as if he needed to _think_ to act like himself, it was that he needed to think to make Lenalee into Lavi in his mind. He needed to believe it, if only for a moment.

_Lavi. Baka usagi. Baka usagi… Baka usagi…_

He leaned his head back and bit his lip. His hair cascaded down his back in a black silk waterfall, but he paid it no mind.

_It's just Lavi. You don't fear anything. You're unstoppable. GO!_

He opened his eyes. Leanlee watched as Kanda stepped as if through a doorway and looked at her, his customary glare just a hair harder than usual, but otherwise exactly as she had come to expect him to be. He didn't speak to her, only narrowed his eyes as if to say that she were doing something he didn't like by breathing. That was good; she had seen him do that before.

"Yuu-chan came to see me!"

"Che." His face quivered in a way it shouldn't have and she almost stopped the act – she hadn't said she would speak and it surprised him. His reaction, but for the slight falter, was perfect.

"Hug Yuu-chan?" She held out her arms.

"Like Hell."

"Aw, come on! I'll get better with some Yuu-chan lovins!"

"Don't call me Yuu-chan!"

"Oh, don't be cold. You know you _like_ it!"

His lip twitched. "I shouldn't have come!"

"Yuu-chan…don't you love me enough to hug me?"

He sat down again, dropping his head in his hands. "I'm out." He said into his palms, rubbing at his forehead, blinking his eyes repeatedly. "If I say anything else I'll faint."

Lenalee laughed lightly, pressing her fingers to her mouth to stifle the sound. She hadn't thought acting could be quite that fun, or that she would be that good at it, but she was glad of both circumstances. Her shoulders stopped after a moment and she slid her feet to the floor. "You did pretty well. But I thought you were going to laugh for a minute there." She grinned.

"Che. Where did you learn to act like Lavi, anyway?"

"I live with both of you… it would be hard not to know how you both act, Kanda-kun."

"Heh."

A knock sounded at the door but Kanda didn't move to answer it. Instead he spread himself out against the uneven stone floor, lying so he could look up at the ceiling. He didn't care who was at the door, they didn't have anything to do with him, they most likely just wanted to be sure he wasn't dead from spending so much time in his room. So he looked up at the jagged stones and let all of the air from his lungs, please a bit by the sting that filled him when they were empty. He draped an arm over his face and mumbled in Japanese.

Lenalee shook her head at it as she stood up and went to the door, sometimes he could be pitiful without realizing it. She opened the portal expecting to find her brother there to check on her purity, and gasped when Allen smiled at her, silver eyes dancing in the hallway light.

"Allen-kun!"

"Lenalee…san?" He asked, and glanced around him, seeming to think that he had lost himself in the hall with his impeccable sense of directionlessness. When he came to the lengthy conclusion that this was indeed the room he had been looking for, he tilted forward a little passed the girl, eyeing the room suspiciously. "Are you and Kanda… hanging out or something?" The idea seemed completely foreign to him – he was one of the many who didn't think Kanda Yuu capable of having friends of any seriousness – and his metallic eyes became slightly round at the realization that the Japanese Exorcist was lying strewn against the stone floor, seeming dejected. The gray stone under the samurai's back made his skin look comparatively sallow, his dark jacket and too-tight hair lending a touch of perfectionism that didn't quite negate the gaunt quality to his cheekbones. Something seemed off.

"You could say that. When did you get back?" Lenalee said with her customary expression of friendliness. She doubted that Allen would understand Kanda's predicament – he showed most of his emotions like a candle showed its flame and he seemed to have little too no sexual desires overall. She wouldn't talk about it, not without Kanda saying something first.

"Just now." Allen's expression fell. "Are you ok, Kanda? You're lying on the floor…"

"Che." He didn't look up.

"Is he ok?" He asked Lenalee instead.

She waved at him as if that were all the explanation that was needed. "It's… not his day."

Kanda grumbled something that had the word _year_ in it and turned over on his side. Allen _almost_ raised an amused eyebrow.

"Komui wants you, Kanda." He said as pleasantly as he could, because this was Kanda and he would always try to be nice to the samurai, at least until he did something mean.

"For what?" He asked without moving. Lenalee looked back at him and tried not to smile. Kanda was so distracted by his own mind that he was about to have a civilized conversation with Allen Walker, while lying on his back, on his floor, acting completely childish. The changes in him were so strange, she was sure Allen would say something about them before he left, though not to the Japanese man directly.

Allen shrugged. "He didn't say. He was reading your report though. Maybe you screwed it up."

"Che. Not possible."

"Right. I forgot. Kanda's perfect."

"Don't mock me, Old Man."

"It's Allen, Bakanda."

Kanda didn't argue, he simply rolled enough to face completely away, the side of his forehead pressed to the cool stone of the floor. Allen stared at him, dumbstruck, while Lenalee glanced between the two. That hadn't been a real fight, at least not on Kanda's part. She needed to change the subject before Kanda made himself any more obvious than he was, or Allen asked something that would make the samurai explode on him. That was the last thing she needed – a bloody fight over nothing.

"Say, Allen-kun." She started, leaning against the door a bit. "Kanda and I were going to go see Lavi—"

"Were not! I told you I'll fain—" Kanda burst, turning around to look up at Lenalee. He realized too late that Allen had heard him and settled his face into a hard glare, eyes narrowed, lips pressed together, as cold as always. He hoped it was enough to keep the questions at bay, but doubted it, not with the way those round silver eyes were looking at him. _"Kuso."_ He mumbled and flopped himself down again. Allen made a face and looked at Lenalee, confused, and she scratched the side of her cheek at him, seeming to think for a moment about what came next. Kanda didn't wait for her do anything stupid and simply stood up, eyes turned away from them both.

"Kanda-kun?"

"Che. I'll go talk to Komui. You two… go see Lavi." He said through his teeth and pushed passed them, leaving both of them staring at his back as he moved down the hall. He listened behind him as he went, knowing that Allen would say something as soon as he was supposedly too far away to hear. He wasn't so much interested in what the silver haired boy thought as how Lenalee covered for him. She knew the real problem, after all.

"Did he just call Lavi his name?"

"Mmhmm. He's… feeling a little sick, I think."

"Oh… I hope he feels better."

_Sick? _ Kanda thought with a cringe. _You mean…heartsick?_

-- -- --

**TBC? Reviews are love!!**


	3. Puerility and Determination

**This update is sooner than expected, but it kind of makes sense to update this faster than TFL. The chapters are shorter, the story is shorter, the wait should be shorter, ne?**

**Disclaimer of d'smiles: I do not own D.Gray-man. If I did… the manga would be produced so quickly, the creators of Bleach would feel threatened.**

**WARNINGS: CURSING. SO MUCH CUSSING. Mild homosexual references. If anyone thinks the cursing is too much for a T-rated fic, tell me and I'll change it to M. Thank you.**

* * *

Part Two: Puerility and Determination

It was always impossible to tell what time it was in the science department simply because no one slept on a schedule that resembled anything like that of a normal human being's. Two hours after lunch the control room was thronged with people, half of them dozing, the other half so strung out on coffee they didn't seem to comprehend the meaning of the word _sleep_. The faces that greeted Kanda were two-thirds familiar, those the ones that actually spoke to him were mostly people he did not recognize, those that didn't understand he glared because that was how he felt, not how he wanted his face to be stuck when he was old. Grunting usually got him an expression of confusion, nodding got him smiles, but barking a command to get out of the way got him the best reaction of all – the man dropped his paperwork and scurried aside like someone had suddenly set his hair on fire.

He kept the barking up, it was easiest. No one but Reever barked back, and even then the Australian did it from behind a Finder, and ducked out of sight as soon as Kanda turned his glare at him. No one even tried to greet him after that, they were too frightened by the aura of bloodlust he exuded at all that set eyes on him. He was thankful of it. He didn't have to stop and wait for anymore idiots to say hello to him when he was already dangling at the end of his figurative rope.

When he came into the office he did so on light feet, surreptitiously circumventing a number of discarded papers and neglected pens, a sparse few quills and a despondent looking inkwell. The supervisor's desk had a man draped across it, beret wearing head tilted over his arm, left hand curled by his torso in protection of a coffee cup. Kanda shook his head at it – Komui was going to die by the time he was fifty if he kept up the coffee and the sleep deprivation – and moved forward enough to tug the hat off of the scientist's head.

"Mhm…I told you no…" The Chinese man grumbled into his shoulder. "You can't eat that… what _are_ you touching…?"

Kanda sighed. "Komui."

"_Hot."_ The man mumbled gently. "Nibble it?"

"Komui!"

"Why yes, I love the color red…"

"Lenalee is seducing me."

"Not _my Lenalee!"_ His eyes flew open and he sat up, leaving his beret on his desk, glasses smashed crookedly across his face, and he blinked at Kanda as if having never seen his face before. For once he didn't launch himself across the surface of his desk to strangle the samurai, instead he stared and thought and eventually let his face settle into a serious expression of passive neutrality. He picked up his hat and straightened it. "Hello, Kanda-kun."

He narrowed his eyes. "You needed to see me?"

Komui seemed to pretend to think for a moment while he shuffled through papers. After a time he found the one that Kanda remembered to be his mission report and brought it to his eyes, scanning the notes he had left for himself in the margins. After a few seconds the scientist turned the thin stack of papers around and slid it across the wood of his desk, a sigh easing past his lips.

"On the fourth page, I think it's the third paragraph, you said that the creature you killed was composed of flesh and blood and didn't explode like an akuma would have at the contact of Innocence." He said thoughtfully. "I would like more detail on what the creature looked like as well as what happened to the body."

"Two meters tall, thin, and it smelled like rot." Kanda said at once, not wanting to be here anymore than he wanted to be in Lavi's hospital room. "And blood. It had fangs about the length of my fingers and four-clawed hands, with something like a thumb farther down its arm. Forward jutting jaw like a muzzle, and its ears moved toward whatever sound it heard. It walked on two feet, but it ran on four. Does that cover it?" He asked, watching Komui jot down notes without looking at him. The man shook his head, so he went on. "It had fur, white fur, and its back was hunched."

"Would you say that it resembled a wolf at all?"

"Che. About as much as it resembled at mole or a rat."

Komui looked up at him and tapped his pen on the edge of his chin as if the act would conjure some sort of thought from him. After a moment he frowned down at the paper he was making notes on and set his writing utensil aside. "Did it look like any sort of creature you've seen before? If you really think on it."

Kanda frowned back at him, thinking hard, recalling the creature's features in the dark. "Like a dog."

"But not a wolf?"

"No." He shook his head vigorously; a bit disgruntled by the look Komui was giving him, like he was out of his mind to distinguish between the two. Wolves and dogs, at least in Kanda's mind, were entirely different creatures that shared a common, if completely removed, ancestor. "A wolf would have had a longer face, and the ears were round. Looking back, it might have seemed like a bear rather than a dog." He shrugged, showing his indifference. "I buried it in the churchyard where I killed it."

"You… buried…it?"

"Che. I wasn't going to just leave it there."

"In a _churchyard_."

"I wasn't going to drag it to some fucking stranger's house, either. What do you want from me? Miracles?"

Komui dropped his head in his hands. He looked entirely too stressed to be normal. _"Why?! Why_ did you bury it in a churchyard?!"

"Body. Dirt. Bury. Idiot."

"Did a part of the _churchyard_ have a _graveyard_ in it by chance?"

Kanda, who was growing irritated, slammed his hands on the desk in front of him, his relatively calm features smashed up to show his annoyance, his shoulders tense, feet at shoulder width. Komui felt a flutter of fear in his chest. Kanda had never hit him, but he had never seemed this close either. "Che. What are you getting at, Komui? This hasn't been my day and I don't need you nitpicking what I did on my mission to make it worse. Just tell me what I did that you don't like so I won't do it next time!" He said hurriedly, and as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he half regretted them. Komui just looked up at him and slowly, understandingly, nodded.

"If you killed that thing in the churchyard and buried it in the _graveyard_, and it _was_ something evil or tainted, you have succeeding in corrupting the hollowed ground around that graveyard and most likely the churchyard as well. That means," He pulled his glasses down his nose and pushed the back up more comfortably, not looking at Kanda. The Japanese man furrowed his brow at this new information. "The infestation of zombies, vampires, and were-creatures that the town is now complaining about might be your fault."

"Zombies." The was a disbelieving note in his voice.

"Yes. And were-beasts and vampires."

"Zombies?" It was beginning to sound like amusement.

"Kanda?"

"Zom…bies?" The samurai pressed a hand to his mouth and proceeded to make a strange, barking, choking sound into it, eyebrows pushed together, eyes pressed shut. His expression behind his fingers twisted into an odd look that might have been a smile or a snarl, too well hidden to be readable. He had to lift his other hand and cover his mouth yet more to keep the sound muffled.

"This is no laughing matter, Kanda."

The Japanese man unleashed a wheeze that dyed his cheeks a color between maroon and crimson. After a moment he cleared his throat and straightened his lips, looking serious. "Zombies are more your field than mine, Supervisor."

"If that is a reference to a drug I made and a ghost found…"

"_Ergha!"_ Kanda turned away and clamped his hands over his mouth again. Komui seethed behind him.

"Just go. There's more investigating that has to be done anyway. Do you _really_ find it to be that amusing? I don't think I've seen you laugh since you were eleven…" He shook his head and sighed, eyeing his papers. He wasn't lying either. Kanda laughed about as often as Lavi cried, and that wasn't very often at all as far as he was aware. The samurai stiffened, eyes suddenly narrowed, and turned a glare at him. Komui smirked.

"I was not laughing. I'm choking at your failure."

"Right. When you go, please ask Lavi if he remembers anything more specific than you do." Komui said plainly, and picked up a stack of papers which he proceeded to shuffle through. Kanda stood in front of him as still as a statue, staring, and the scientist cocked an eyebrow at his expression, not understanding. After a moment the Japanese man looked slowly down at the desk and heaved a sigh, his expression oddly pained, before he turned toward the door without even a word more. The reaction confused Komui, not understanding what was or was not going on between the two, and he scratched at his forehead when Kanda opened the door despondently and walked through it like a man traveling in the direction of his grave. He pressed his lips together when the door closed soundlessly, the minute click of the knob the only thing that reached his ears.

"I wonder what's eating him…"

-- -- --

"_Fuck!"_

Allen inhaled his mouthful of dango at the word and proceeded to gag on it, perfectly incapable of drawing in air around the large lump of sweetened dough. He was thankful when someone punched him hard between the shoulder blades, thus dislodging the wad of partially digested food and clearing his airway, it also made him smile when the hunk of sustenance left his mouth and landed squarely in the middle of Howard Link's plate.

He had come here rather than going to see Lavi right away. Food always came first.

"Sorry." He chimed with a smile, though his voice came out a bit less than sincere. The blond man looked down at his ruined pineapple upside down cake and raised a lip at it, his expression saying that Allen Walker's saliva was about as disgusting to him as an ill preserved ten day old corpse. "Really. I am." He added, proving that he was indeed not sorry and instead quite amused by Link's reaction. He didn't even ask what the man was doing when he stood up and stalked back toward Jerry's window.

"Do you think he's ever even tasted a vegetable?" Lenalee asked from behind him, making him turn. He saw then that she was sitting across from Kanda, whom was fiddling with his soba as if he expected to grow eyes and tear ducts and cry at him if he brought it near his mouth. Allen frowned at them. He wasn't particularly bothered by the fact that they seemed to be spending so much time together, he was more bothered by how Kanda acted about it. Almost shy, or unsure. Like maybe…

"No!" He said at once, more to his own thoughts than to her question. There was just no way Kanda liked Lenalee, it was disgusting. Kanda didn't even have sexual thoughts; he was sure, Kanda was too angry at the world to think with anything but his sword.

Lenalee hummed, bringing her ceramic spoon to her lips thoughtfully. "Maybe he's had carrot cake?"

"Che. That is a sin against vegetables."

Allen scoffed. "How would you know? It's not like you eat carrots either."

"What the fuck do you think tempura is, Moyashi? Fried fingers?"

"It's carrots?"

"Vegetables. And fish."

Allen blinked at Kanda, who was not looking at him, and then at Lenalee. Taking his fullest plate he turned completely around and moved tables as stealthily as he could, hoping that Link wouldn't notice when he was missing from behind the mound of food he had spat over. His tray clicked on the table and a pair of sapphire eyes flicked up at him before they went down again, looking at Kanda's buckwheat noodles as if he couldn't possibly be hungry. The Japanese Exorcist didn't say a word, only twirled his chopsticks a little less enthusiastically, and then, melodiously, sighed.

"What's going on?" Allen questioned hurriedly. Lenalee looked at him and spooned soup into her mouth with her eyebrows perched high on her forehead. It was obvious by how she kept filling and refilling her mouth that she wasn't going to say anything unless he stuck around until she was out of soup, but he pretended not to notice. Instead he turned his eyes to Kanda, eyebrows furrowed. "Something _is_ going on." He insisted softly.

Kanda picked up a noodle and threaded it through the loop of another before pulling it back around. He was making a square knot.

Allen's eyes dashed between the two of them as he stuffed a lump of fried chicken between his teeth, followed by a gob of mashed potatoes. "Whosh gonna tell meh wash goin' on?" He said through his food. He knew that Kanda hated bad manners, he was counting on a violent act that would end with someone awkwardly screaming through the cafeteria what was wrong, but it didn't happen. The samurai sighed again and dropped his chopsticks in the middle of his plate, not bothering to set them like he normally did, and pushed his dinner away. Allen blinked at him, no longer chewing.

"_Fuck."_ It was quieter this time, but that was the voice that had made Allen choke on his dango. Kanda sank down on the table as he said it, ponytail spreading over the top of his head until it rested on the tabletop next to his cheek. Lenalee lowered her soup and let out a soft chuckle.

"He's going to figure it out if you keep this up." She scolded gently.

He looked up at her and narrowed his eyes to slits. "Che. If you say a word I'll cut off what little hair you have."

"My clipboard will defend me. Can you keep a secret, Allen-kun?"

"Hell no he can't keep a secret!" Kanda was sitting straight in an instant. "I will _kill him_ if you tell him."

"Kanda-kun, can't you tell that Allen is genuinely worried?"

He gave Allen a sweep with his eyes and saw nothing but the desire to dig up dirt on a social enemy.

"_We_ shall not be telling anyone anything."

"Right. I'll tell him."

"No!"

"You're being immature."

"I am being safe."

"Only the three of us will know…"

"Three can keep a secret if the other two are dead."

"Is that something _Lavi_ told you, Kanda-kun?"

The Japanese Exorcist stopped breathing and the blood drained from his face before it rushed back and he growled. His ruffled bangs shaded his eyes dangerously and he took the chopsticks back into his right hand so he could squeeze them. The slight glimmer of white was the only thing that alerted Allen to the fact that he was glaring as hard as he could at the girl across from him, and the guttural sound he made warned that he was on the edge of losing it. Kanda stood suddenly then sat back down, grumbling under his breath all the while, and narrowed his eyes at Lenalee as if she had done something foul. Allen began to chew again.

"Now you have to tell me." Allen said when he swallowed.

"Che. You wouldn't get it anyway. You're not old enough."

"So you _do_ like someone."

"_Fuck!"_

"If you keep cursing, calling Allen too young will be pointless."

"Wait, you really _like_ someone?" Allen was incredulous enough to drop his fork on his plate and lean forward, too interested, too close, and too surprised. He widened his eyes to a point that made Lenalee's want to water in sympathy and lowered his voice to a secretive whisper, as if the lucky girl might overhear. "I didn't even know you were capable of that kind of emotion! Who's the victim?"

"I am going to stab you."

"Kanda-kun! Just tell him."

"Fuck. You. Both."

"Please, please, _please_ can I tell him? He might be able to help."

"Che. I'll never hear the end of it."

"Is that a ye—"

"_No."_

Allen made a face at Kanda and picked up his chopsticks, pulling them out of reach even before the Japanese man could notice they were missing from his hand. Before he could round on the British boy with Mugen, Allen took them one in each hand and pressed the ends together, looking over the top of them with an expression of sinister intentions. Lenalee watched in horror as he pulled them apart and pressed them together again, changing angles a bit so they slid up together before the came down again. A confused expression came over Kanda's face, curiosity winning out over the desire to get back eating utensils he hadn't even been intending to use.

"What are you doing?"

"It's a guy."

"What?"

"You like a guy."

"You're out of your _mind_, Moyashi."

"Then why are you staring _ever_ so interestedly at the chopsticks? You know you want it."

"Allen-kun!"

"Because they're my Goddamn chopsticks, brat!"

"Too bad you don't have a Y in your name. I could call you Gaynda instead of BaKanda. I'll have to take what I can get, I guess…"

"Give me back my chopsticks."

"See? You're gay…"

"Allen…kun…?"

"Give. Me. My. _Chopsticks."_

"If the short one is Kanda, the long one is…"

"_Do you want to die, Moyashi?"_

"Lavi."

"_Fuck!"_

Lenalee clapped her hands over her mouth, frozen between shock, horror, and an emotion not unlike glee. She forgot all about her soup, her spoon, her food, and simply stared at Kanda and Allen, the first lying with one arm stretched out across the top of the table as if to get his chopsticks back, the second grinning like a madman at his fallen comrade. She half expected one of them to simply kill the other in that instant, but neither moved to, nor did they act as if to make peace between each other. Allen simply held his stolen goods in one hand and leaned closer to Kanda's ear, whispering lowly.

"You mean… I got it right?" Allen continued, his expression showing that he could not, for any reason, believe that Kanda Yuu liked Lavi the apprentice Bookman. Lenalee was too busy struggling with denial, so Kanda had to look up with one eye and frown.

"You honestly think I'm going to tell you after that stunt you just pulled?"

"Well, yeah…" Allen tilted his head in a Lenalee-like fashion, only his hair actually flipped the way he wanted it when he spontaneously tugged his head back. Kanda tried not to notice and failed at it. "Otherwise I'll just assume that it's Lavi, being you cursed when I suggested him. Though… you've been cursing a lot so I could be wrong, but I can just assume that was a fluke before, if I want."

"And what the hell are you going to do if I just let you assume that you're right?"

"Nothing."

"Good." Kanda turned his face away from Allen and sighed, leaving the silver eyed boy drowning in a sea of questions. He laid his palm on the tabletop next to his face and simply looked at it, remembering, until his eyes fell shut and he sighed again, slowly. "Shit." He mumbled before he pressed the palm over his own face in an effort to remove himself from the room without actually leaving. After a moment, timid fingers started running though his hair, slowly, and he made a little negative sound at it that was pointedly ignored.

Allen masticated very, very slowly as he watched Lenalee tame the murderous beast.

"You see Allen," Lenalee said gently, not exactly whispering, just in a voice that was two-thirds soothing and one third excited. Her fingers were perfectly steady though, and the looks she was getting for _touching_ the _Untouchable Asshole_ _Kanda Yuu_ didn't seem to bother her. Her gray eyes just smiled at the people who saw and they didn't give a damn about what came out of her mouth from the shock. "Kanda… isn't a people person like you are. So the fact that he likes someone enough to want to be in the same room with them, let alone have physical contact, is about as scary to him as… you suddenly having the urge to fast might be to you. And, because he doesn't know how to act, he doesn't have the slightest idea what to do with himself so…"

"He ends up acting like a child?"

"Shut up." Kanda half grumbled. He wouldn't admit to losing sleep over what had happened, but it was hard to hide it when he was teetering on the edge of dreams just because of a hand in his hair and a quiet atmosphere, which usually didn't happen in the cafeteria.

"Don't provoke him; he's had a hard two weeks." Lenalee chided. "And don't tease him, either. He has to go see the person he likes today. In fact, he should have two _hours_ ago, but he's procrastinating."

"Are you trying to lecture him without him noticing?"

"Kind of. Why?"

Allen pointed to the side of Kanda's face, whose eyes had shut entirely, his breathing even and slow, fingers curled restfully against his ear. For a moment Lenalee didn't believe that he had actually fallen asleep _here_ while talking about _this_, but the more she thought about it, the more sense it made. If Kanda really had been thinking about it for two weeks, he hadn't had a good night's sleep in that time, and the presence of people he knew, as well as people who understood, had calmed him enough to allow him a gentle respite for it all. She pulled her hand back and he stayed there, his expression serene in the electric lights.

"He's kind of pretty when he's sleeping." Allen commented more than half sarcastically, though there was still a note of truth in the words. He reached out and brushed his fingers through the soft hair of Kanda's bangs, and smiled. "And friendly." He said with a small laugh. Lenalee made a face at him that might have been disappointed and stood, doing her nonexistent hair flip with a frown. "What?"

"Let's get him to his room and then go see Lavi."

"So it _is_ Lavi?"

"I am not at liberty to say."

"Poor, poor Lavi…"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Allen scratched his head awkwardly, averting his gaze. "Well, wouldn't you be a little worried about tough love if Kanda liked you? I mean… he's mean to people he's friends with so…"

Lenalee sighed. "Well… I think he'll be ok."

"Kanda? Or… Lavi?"

She narrowed her eyes at him. "I'm not going to tell you."

"Fine, fine." He shoveled food into his mouth as hurriedly as he could, intent on finishing at least a plate before they went. He was no longer at the table when Link came to join him.

-- -- --

"Lena-love you saved me from starvation!" Lavi cheered from his bed at the sight of the Chinese girl. He had eaten the hamburger and large dish of brownies she had sent and the empty tray sat next to his bed virtually sparkling, and he sat with a hand placed on his stomach, as if satisfied. His expression brightened ten times over at the sight of Allen behind her, looking slightly thoughtful. He threw his arms out in greeting, and regretted the motion almost as soon as he had done it. "Ow…" He dropped his arms a little. "Moyashi-chan!"

"It's Allen." The British boy mumbled, but moved to embrace him regardless.

Lavi grunted at his hold, a crooked smile splitting his lips. "Shit, don't squeeze me too hard, you'll mess up the stitches." He half joked, slipping back against the pillows as Allen pulled back enough to sit on the bed beside his knees. He smiled as if he knew something and Lenalee pulled up her chair, the three of them sitting in a strange sort of triangle. Lavi tried not to look awkward around her – because things were awkward now that he thought about it – and simply leaned a little further into the bed. "You both came and still no Yuu-chan. I was stupid to hope."

"Yeah. He should be up if he gets horn— " Allen was cut off abruptly by Lenalee's fist colliding violently with his lower jaw. He flew back across the mattress and landed in a heap on the far side of the bed, a low groan sounding from his throat in a way that made Lavi worry for his spinal chord. He blinked for a moment at the white haired Exorcist before he turned to look at the quiet, petite Chinese girl whom had just one handedly manhandled him over a four foot wide mattress, and gasped at her bloodthirsty expression. Her eyes were slatted, lip pulled back into a sneer, and her teeth glittered with a sort of evil aura somehow created by the sheer violence with which she had acted. She looked up at him and blinked before her face melted into a mask of femininity.

"My hand slipped." She cocked her head to the side.

"No shit!" Lavi said with a laugh. He leaned a bit to the right so he could see how Allen was recovering and smiled when the British boy sat up, holding a swiftly reddening glove to his nose. "Gods, Moyashi! Did she break it?"

"Ich Allen." He grumbled and pushed himself a little higher. "She 'it meh jaw, th'floor got muh nose." He explained, and lifted his hand to show that the inside of his mouth was bleeding as well, a swift line running down the side of his face. Allen looked at Lenalee, who made a face that said this was only the beginning if he continued to spill secrets, before he forced himself to smile. It was Lavi; he knew that for sure now, even if it had come at a slightly higher cost than he had anticipated. "Kin' I git a tissue…"

Lavi shook his head at it. "You don't need a tissue, you need a nurse. Call button… call button…" He reached back and pressed the switch on the wall. As he watched, Allen narrowed his eyes at Lenalee, but when he looked at her she was smiling apologetically at him. He felt ignored and lied to. He sighed. "What were you trying to say before Lenalee's hand slipped in an upward direction?"

"Oh. I wus jus sayin' tat Kan'a might come shee you if 'e gets hor—"

"Ded." Lenalee finished. "If we horde him up here with everyone else. Haha. Ha. Hahaha. Ha. Haaa…" The laugh was perhaps the sickest most faked thing he had ever heard come out of her mouth. She bent an arm behind her head and smiled so her eyes were nearly shut, then stood up enthusiastically. Lavi blinked at her in question until she took Allen firmly by an elbow and gave a tug. "Well, that nurse is taking forever, we'll just go find one!" She gave a pull that yanked Allen to his feet and started for the door, her expression as false as her laugh.

"Wait. No. Lenalee—" Allen was pulling back, looking at Lavi as if he wanted to speak.

"No, you'll be _much_ better off with some _treatment_, Allen-_kun._"

"But I was gonna tell Lavi—"

Lenalee opened the door and chucked the younger Exorcist out of it, her eyes flashing murder. She smiled over her shoulder at Lavi, just as bright as always. "We'll be back when he isn't bleeding! Take a nap or something! Seeya! Feel better!"

The door slammed.

"What the _hell_ is going on?"

-- -- --

"_What the fu—"_

"Kanda-kun—"

"Do you mean go see him if I'm _horny_?! You're what?! _Twelve?! _How the hell do you even know the meaning of the word?!"

"I'm fifteen, maybe sixteen. Trust me, I _know_ what horny means."

The Japanese Exorcist was pacing back and forth in his room, eyes rolling like those of a frightened stallion. Lenalee sat on the end of his bed while Allen occupied the floor beside it, both of them looking various levels of distraught mixed with amusement. Of course, it was harder to read Allen's face with his nose splinted, but his eyes still danced with glee, metallic irises shining like silver orbs of happiness, lips drawn up in a half circle of amusement. Kanda found it annoying that the boy was even involved in any of this, but he wasn't about to kill him at this moment, he was too busy worrying about himself. And about Lavi. Lavi, really, was more important than any of it.

"Che. I don't give a damn how old you are, I just want to know what the _hell_ you were thinking! Horny… cockshit motherfu—" He was vaguely aware that Lenalee had stealthily covered Allen's ears with her hands. "I should _maim_ you for even trying to say it. How stupid are you? I'm going to _kill_ you if you ever—"

"I can still hear him." Allen said to Lenalee as if Kanda were not raving mad two feet in front of him. The samurai turned on him like an enraged cat about to pounce or hiss or mutilate. Allen smiled up at him pleasantly, or as pleasantly as he could with his nose how it was. "Sorry, GAYNDA, what were you saying?"

"DIE!"

"Stop it both of you!" Lenalee screamed, her clipboard placed between Allen's face and Mugen's tip. She watched Kanda tremble with the desire to kill the young man in front of him, anger and hatred built up behind his eyes in a look of sheer, unadulterated malice, unstoppable force. The sword point, went throw the metal before she could understand that such a thing was a possibility, and Allen gasped when the cool steal of Kanda's blade brushed the side of his neck. Lenalee swallowed thickly while Allen looked up at the older man, unblinking.

"You missed." The words weren't as daring as Allen had hoped they would be.

"Che. If I kill you I'll get blood on my bedding."

"Both of you please stop fighting. We'll never get anything done if you're killing each other."

"_Kanda_ – excuse me – _Gaynda_ will never get done if he keeps trying to kill people who point out his flaws."

"Che!"

Mugen slid away from Allen and into its sheath, Kanda pulling away with it. He plodded across the room to the wall and leaned against it, tilting his head against the stone, thinking. Lenalee and Allen watched him sigh, watched him reach up and slowly, shyly, yank the cord from his hair. His tresses spilled down his shoulders and across his back, tangling against the wall, but he didn't seem to care about them, he ignored their very existence.

"Kanda…kun?" Lenalee questioned from the mattress. A flurry of fear ran through her at the way he held his shoulders and the gradual way he drew in a breath and let it out again.

He enjoyed the cold bite of rock on his scalp. "I almost hit your brother today."

"That's happened before…" She offered in an attempt to help.

One sapphire eye cracked at her and she saw no light in it. "Not two minutes later, I laughed at him."

"No way!" Allen cursed lightly at the thump of a clipboard on his forehead.

"What are you saying?" Lenalee asked instead of making assumptions, but she pretty much knew the answer when Kanda went sliding down the wall with his eyes closed again. He placed a hand over his heart, the cord from his hair held between his clenched fingers, and he swallowed, his expression seeming to fight itself chaotically. After a long, quiet moment, Lenalee stood up from the bed and placed a hand on Allen's head, holding him in place while Kanda picked the face he wanted to present the world.

It was a strange, mirthless smile. "Che. I'm losing my mind." He lifted both hands to his face and let his head fall, a sigh shaking his shoulders. He knew he had to look like a pouting child, but he honestly couldn't say that he cared. "Even when I'm not thinking about…" A more violent shutter at certain memories, "What happened, I'm still on the edge of losing it. And I _know_ that I'm on the edge of losing it, and I _don't_ want to." He looked up at Lenalee and his eyes moved hastily to Allen, then back to her, and he threw his head back against the stone hard enough to send a pleasant bit of pain through his skull.

Allen gasped before he spoke, worried a bit that he was too much in the habit of teasing the older Exorcist to be perfectly innocent with his words. "So… do you have a suggestion on what we might do to… make the emotional upheaval easier on you?"

"Che." Kanda repeated the motion with his head and Lenalee's fingers curled in Allen's hair. She didn't like that he was hurting himself even if it wasn't more than a light bruise to dull the confusion. "Yeah. Shoot me."

"Gladly!"

"Don't be so enthusiastic about it!" Lenalee scolded Allen with a deep, sincere frown, but when she looked back at Kanda he was smiling. It shocked her a little, that he could produce the expression without cracking a line down the center of his face, but it surprised her more that he held it for longer than two seconds. His thin lips were pulled back from his teeth a little more than they were in most smiles, leaning slightly to the left, and his eyes narrowed a bit with the rising of his cheekbones, forehead smooth and unwrinkled by violent intentions. She couldn't even begin to express how strange it was.

"Holy crap, you _are_ going insane." She whispered into the air.

Allen attempted to snort and failed, Kanda's expression fell.

She cleared her throat and stepped into the middle of the room and turned slowly around between her two charges, pacing as Kanda had before. Her bare feet made hardly any sound at all on the floor as she moved; a harsh change from the clacking of her dark boots. She tried not to think about it as a plan slowly, but surely, began to take shape in her mind. "We don't need to shoot you and we don't need to stop you from feeling, if we do either those plans, you'll never have a chance to make things right between you. What you need to do, even if it sucks, is go up there and do what Komui told you to. After that, we need to formulate a plan that enables you to suddenly, unexpectedly, kiss him without him figuring out that it was planned."

"Now you're the crazy one."

"Quiet, hear me out." She went on, not looking at either of them. "If you can just kiss him how you did before, without him stopping you… maybe it will all click. And if it doesn't click – if he doesn't put two and two together and get that you kissed him – you can either confess your lustiness and see how he takes it, or threaten to cut him to ribbons if he ever gets his mouth in a position to fall into yours ever again." She said with a cheery little smile that he didn't feel at all like returning. She held the clipboard to her chest as if somehow, someway, doing so would make everything brighter. "You just have to _act_ _normal_ until we actually carry out the plan, Kanda-kun. Otherwise… I'm afraid he might corner you over it." She tried to look slightly afraid of that idea but didn't manage. She knew it was potentially the best thing for him to be cornered, because his nature would act rather than his emotions. Lavi would find himself pinned and kissed without even a thought of Mugen in his mind.

"No." Kanda growled, but made no move to stand. He just looked up at Lenalee from his little corner of the room and scowled expertly. He still had the look, if he really tried to make it. "First things first. I'll go see him. After that, we're making a real plan."

Lenalee nodded, grateful for his sudden determination, and fought down a smile when he crossed to the door on feet that landed a bit too loudly to be normal. There were little things, like how he left his hair down, that wouldn't be noticed by the people who hardly knew him, but would set off fireworks for anyone with an observant bone in their body. Like Lavi. If he figured it out, Lenalee could only guess, but he would sure as well know that something was wrong. Kanda, for the life in him, wouldn't be able to bury the truth.

The samurai stopped at the door and turned back to the two of them. His dark eyes went from one to the other, noting Lenalee's suppressed look of enthusiasm, Allen's seeming indifference to everything. He settled himself on his feet and squared his shoulders, the perfect picture of resolve. He placed his left hand on his sword's hilt and let the other hang beside him, casual, relaxed. He ground his teeth for a moment before he spoke into the silence.

"Che. Who's coming with me?"

* * *

**TBC? Thank you all for the wonderful reviews! I hope you continue to enjoy it. 8D**


	4. Apprehension and Hypothesis

**A lot happens. And a lot DOESN'T happen. And there are questions raised that will not be answered yet.  
**

**And stuff. I love writing this. Every time TFL makes me cry, I come work on this little fic. And it totally makes me happy and I giggle and it's so much fun. I hope you like reading it half as much as I like writing it. XD**

**Disclaimer: I do not own D.Gray-man. If I did… Allen would be a true assface. Grr.**

**WARNINGS: Cursing. Implied men-loving-men, and a little blood.**

* * *

Part Three: Apprehension and Hypothesis

Allen couldn't believe it. Not _only_ had Kanda been too shy to go see Lavi alone, he would also stop walking at intervals of about twelve to seventeen footsteps to say something about how he didn't want to go, it wasn't worth it, and he would kill Lenalee if he had to take another step. Of course they went on down the hall after she threatened him with her clipboard or gave his hair a savage tug, neither of which seemed to make Kanda happy. Allen stalked along in the shadows, intent on finding out what happened even if he wasn't invited. He stayed out of sight to the best of his ability – which was terribly difficult for a white haired boy with a broken nose and a swollen lip – by darting into nooks and crannies in the walls when Kanda turned to see whose eyes were following him.

He was spotted by Link before he could follow the pair into the medical wing.

And was thus delayed by a lecture.

By the time Lenalee and Kanda came to the hall where Lavi's room was, the samurai was nearly hyperventilating, the blood having drained from his face and run into his gut. Lenalee let him stop in front of the door to regain his composure, bent over with his back to the wall, his hands on his knees, anxiety pouring off of him in tangible waves. He took a moment to undo the top two buttons of his jacket, then claimed that he had to go to the bathroom (which Lenalee did not believe), then insisted that he should not be wandering around with his hair down (which she also did not believe), and finally explained that he was feeling woozy and should have eaten before the whole ordeal had started (at which point she clipboard-ed him in the shoulder and opened the door). He stood in stunned silence just out of sight of the young man inside and simply breathed for a long, agonizing moment. His hands were numb. His feet felt heavy. He was worried that his intestines were turning into snakes within his abdomen. For the first time in memory he wanted nothing more than to run.

And Lenalee just smiled, took him by the black fabric of his sleeve, and paraded them inside.

"Yuu-chan!" Lavi's voice was like a ringing bell, bright and filled with joy and surprise and something he might have mistaken as yearning. Kanda's sapphire eyes fell on the redhead, who held out his arms as if for an embrace, and studied the way his face was shaped, the genuine turn to his smile. It was as if the redhead gave off an ethereal light that he hadn't noticed before, a sort of glow that added just a bit more to the room. His mouth was moving and more of his melodic voice was coming out, forming pleasant words that Kanda couldn't find it in himself to comprehend. The idiot never said anything worth saying anyway, so it didn't really matter. He could be as nervous and perplexed as he wanted so long as he was rude afterward.

And then Lenalee was looking at him, and so was Lavi, and he had the feeling that something had been said to him that he hadn't heard. He looked between the two for a moment, blinking, until he realized he wasn't glaring. He was looking about owlishly, like a child waking from a dream.

His expression hardened suddenly, becoming so malicious and austere Lenalee cringed at the change. He then, in the hope that it would stop him from being discovered, said the only word that had always, no matter the situation, been safe to utter:

"Che."

"That's not an answer, Yuu-chan!"

"Don't call me Yuu-chan!" He growled without looking at Lavi. He could feel the sweat beading on his palms, as cold as ice, burning in the crevasses of his fingers. He could feel the heat of an ill controlled blush on his cheeks, searing just beneath the surface of his skin, and the rapid pounding of his heart against his ribcage, rattling his core. The ratio of adrenaline to blood in his system had to be wrong.

Lavi responded at once, prepared for the comeback, enjoying himself. Kanda looked at him from the corner of his eye and, for a split second, wondered why it was that he didn't just _let_ the apprentice Bookman call him his name. He dismissed the idea at once however, because it wasn't _normal_. "That's not an answer either! I asked you if you saw a girl kiss me! Is that so hard to answer?"

"No! I didn't see a girl kiss you!"

"Did you see a _guy_ then?"

Kanda was silent. His mouth open and shut a few times, no air flowing through it, and he turned a strange shade of purple, then pink, then faded to white. He didn't breathe. He watched Lavi's expression go from lightly curious to laughingly apologetic, as if he expected to be chased with a katana.

"Sorry, Yuu-chan. Didn't know that sort of thing grossed you out so much…"

"It doesn't it's just…

"Oh? Gotta secret?"

"Fuck you."

"Is that an offer?"

"If it was you'd say yes."

"You're hot, Yuu-chan. Of course I'd say yes."

"Whore." His mind chimed_, Then yes, it was an offer._

"I don't see you complaining."

Lenalee's left arm shot out from her side and her clipboard connected with Mugen's hilt, Kanda's reaction to her attack was just a hair faster than she had anticipated. She had aimed to stop the teasing before it became too terrible, before Kanda lost it, but she could see that the samurai had himself under control enough that her 'twitch' hadn't been necessary. He didn't even pause.

"A guy kissed you." He said with finality, but he was looking at Lenalee, not Lavi, his pained expression hidden behind her still raised weapon. He went on before she could drop her arm, hiding the fact that he couldn't hold his face in a glare anymore. "Right on the lips. In the middle of a tavern." He rushed, and then gave Lenalee's arm a little nudge that let her drop it, his face more or less _normal_ now that he had said it. Lavi was blinking at the two of them and he tried not to stare back to strongly.

"That was… violent…"

"I've been twitchy." Lenalee lied ever so horribly.

Lavi looked at Kanda, eye noting his loose hair, and frowned a little. "A guy did it?"

Kanda nodded.

"What'd he look like?" Lavi prodded. Kanda didn't sound like he was lying, not at all, just nervous, edgy, _frightened._ There was just a modicum of something else in his voice that Lavi didn't understand. He hadn't heard it before. Not from Kanda, to say the least. He would have to listen more if he wanted to even guess what it was.

Kanda narrowed his eyes rather than biting his lip like he wanted. Himself. He had to describe himself in a way that wouldn't be obvious. He swallowed hard, seeming to think about it, trying to make a face that was thoughtful but not overly so, the way he had described what Komui wanted to know more about. "Che. About one hundred seventy-five centimeters tall, lithe build, dark hair and clothes, pale, but not European pale. Kind of…" He stopped. No, he couldn't call himself _feminine_ or _pretty_ or anything of the sort, because that would be admitting that he thought that of himself in some, twisted way. He needed a word that wasn't quite _androgynous,_ because he wasn't androgynous, glancing people thought he was a girl, looking closely they thought he was a man. There wasn't a word that he knew for that, not off the top of his head, so he tapered off, drawing his face into a scowl.

"Goth?"

"Che. No."

"Old?"

"About your age."

"Manly?"

"Shut up. You annoy me."

Lavi frowned deeper. "It's fine if you can't think of a word, I didn't even think you'd answer in the first place."

"Che. If it meant that much to you of course I'll tell you what he looked like."

"Aww, Yuu-chan shows how he loves me! Come here, Yuu!"

"Die. Painfully."

Lavi pouted purposely, every part of him downcast as if he had been rejected by his lover of the hour, and silently let the argument play on fast forward in the back of his mind. Yes, there was something strange about Kanda's tone, something _warm_. He furrowed his eyebrows at it as he stared down at the white of his bed sheets, acting as if they were the most interesting thing he had ever laid eyes on. The white of them let him see Kanda's expressions again, a little harder where they shouldn't have been, a little nicer when they usually turned into snarls. He was so busy thinking about it that he hardly felt Lenalee take up residence on the end of his bed.

"How are you feeling?" She inquired with a turn of her head that made her hair fall down by her nose. She didn't seem to mind it, nor did she seem to notice that the black lines of hair served as a guide line first to her face, and then to her chest. Lavi didn't let his eyes wander, he just looked up and smiled, though he knew the expression didn't have the seductive quality that it usually did.

"Still sore." He shrugged, pressing a hand to his side. Her eyes didn't follow the motion, but Kanda's did. He looked up at the samurai, his face pressed into an expression of thought. "How about you, Yuu-chan? You killed that thing while I was out of it and didn't even take a scratch?"

The Japanese man, for once, didn't look away from him when he spoke, didn't avoid eye contact, didn't _flinch_. The sapphire eyes that looked at him might have been peering into his soul for all the apprentice Bookman knew. "I'm fine." He said with a minute, subtle, forced narrowing of his eyes.

Internally, Kanda thought he was going to melt.

"So unfair." Lavi grumbled, leaning a bit on his pillows. He smiled crookedly, his hand pushed a bit on his ribs before he let it slide down beside him, resting on its back on the mattress. Lenalee's hand on his knee almost made him look at her; it would have if he weren't basking in the glory of calling Kanda _Yuu-chan_ without getting even a raise of his lip. He decided to keep it up, even if he were staring listlessly at the ceiling. "I get a giant hunk bitten outta me and Yuu-chan just hacks that wolf thing to death no problem. Depressing. You make me feel worthless."

"Che. You are worthless."

"I bet Yuu-chan didn't even get a black wolf hair on his coat."

Kanda frowned, but Lavi didn't see it. "Black?"

Lavi looked up quizzically, not understanding the confusion in his friend's tone. He shrugged off the feeling that there was something wrong with both Kanda _and_ Lenalee for her to be twitching and him to be ignoring his name, and simply stared in curiosity. Kanda's hair, which was gorgeous, he had to admit, hung loosely down his back, thick and silky and perfect like always. His jacket was a bit unbuttoned, showing a few more inches of neck than usual as well as the bump of his Adam's apple, the hollow of his throat, the start of a collar bone. His tongue curled back in his mouth when he realized those eyes, the eyes that always seemed to want him dead, were sweeping over his chest almost shamelessly – or maybe they were looking for inconsistencies.

_Yuu-chan looks like a girl but is not a girl, Lavi. Control. Yourself. You are straight and so is he. About ninety-nine times more so than you, if that's possible._

"Yeah. Black wolf-person-creature. Big pointy ears, long face, taller than you… and you're what? A meter and a half?"

"A meter and three fourths. Roughly."

Lenalee made a face that neither of them saw. One hundred seventy-five centimeters and a meter and three fourths were the same height, if only Lavi would think about it. She had to fight not to giggle.

"It had big clawed hands that just blocked my hammer like it was nothing, I didn't get a chance to use my fire seal until it had bit me, and even then I just threw it. It didn't burn or anything." He furrowed his brow, looking up at Kanda's entirely too surprised expression with a slight quirk of his lips. "Are you ok, Yuu-chan? You're… looking at me funny."

"Che. The thing I killed had white fur."

"Oh." He paused, thinking. "Oh, _shit._ There were two of them?"

Kanda nodded, resting a hand on Mugen's hilt. "At least."

Lenalee saw an opportunity – Kanda's opportunity to leave – and decided to take it for herself. She stood suddenly, clinging to her clipboard, dancing on her feet, and turned to Lavi with a desperate look on her face. She opened her mouth and closed it again, looked at Kanda apologetically, and then turned back again, words tumbling out of her mouth almost faster than they could follow. "I'll go tell brother right away that there were two of those creature things you two please stay here and continue to discuss the problem I'll bring Allen back if I can get him away from Link long enough to sneak down the hall feel better Lavi goodbye." She didn't pause, she didn't breathe, she didn't show how she felt. She simple bowed her head a little and sauntered out the door at a pace that gave _sauntering_ a new, speedy meaning.

It was not until the door closed that Kanda realized he was now in a room alone with Lavi the Man He Had Kissed.

"_Lena—"_ He started for the door but the contact of a pillow against the side of his head cut him off. He glanced back at Lavi, face drawn into a half-natural scowl. "What?"

"How come you haven't killed me yet?" The redhead said plainly. "And why is Lenalee being so violent? She _punched_ Allen hard enough to break his nose earlier."

"The brat deserved it."

"Oh?" Lavi's expression was like something he had seen before – accusing and condescending and _friendly_. He wanted to feel disgusted but he couldn't make himself. Instead he felt a little excited flurry of desire in his stomach; a shallow flood of hormones in his bloodstream. The desire to curse was almost irrepressible. "What did he do? All he did was say that you might come and see me of your free will eventually." Lavi went on with a shrug.

Kanda tried to grunt noncommittally but the sound came out as more of a groan. "Che. Which I would not."

"Why ya standin' around alone with me then?"

"Because you stopped me from leaving by throwing your pillow at me."

"And why haven't you threatened me for that yet?"

"I don't feel like threatening you."

"And how come you didn't tell me stop when I called you _Yuu-chan_ those last eighty bajillion times?"

"Because I honestly don't give a damn if you call me _Yuu-chan_."

"When did that change?"

"I don't know. Maybe when I ki—" He stopped mid word, as if suddenly he had lost the ability to speak.

Lavi raised an eyebrow, seeming more confused than a dizzy drunk man in a house of mirrors. For a moment his expression seemed to say that he remembered something, to grow bright with understanding and comprehension, and then it grew dark. His face fell and he lifted his right hand to his forehead, blocking his patched eye. "Yuu-chan has figured out that it's no fun to call him Yuu-chan if it doesn't bother him! Oh no! I must mentally elevate your intelligence level to that of a large squid rather than a small pineapple. This will take a—_urgh!_" His pillow hit him squarely in the stomach, driving a small amount of air from his lungs. He wrapped his left arm around it, as if it might support his weight. "I'll have to think up a new nickname! It's my only choice!"

"Che. I hope that pillow makes you bleed to death."

"I know! Yuu-hime!"

"_Hime! _How is that an improvement on Yuu-chan?"

"It's not, Yuu-chan. That's kind of the point."

Kanda looked away. _"Daikirai."_

"Erm… I'm not that good at Japanese yet…"

"_Wakateru."_

"Waaaay over my head, Yuu."

"_Ureshii."_

"Happy?"

"Che. You know one fucking word and it's _happy_? You're retarded."

"Then tell me what you said."

"No."

Lavi threw himself against his remaining pillow and winced, which in turn made his arm tighten against his chest and the pillow that Kanda had thrown back at him. He shut his eye tightly, his expression obviously pained, and tilted his head back in the hope that the motion would let him move his brain farther from his abdomen and thus feel it less. Needless to say it didn't work. He realized with a hissing breath in that it hurt more than it should have, even if he had thrown himself backward, even if he had opened the wounds again. It was worse than it had been when that thing had sank it's teeth into him the first time. He bit his lip.

"Lavi?" Kanda's voice was closer than he remembered it, just at his side, and he cracked his tear filled eye at it, curious why the samurai would be so close. Wounds that weren't fatal or close didn't get him that close. Ever. It wasn't in his nature to be close to people.

"Just a sec…" He said in a gasping, quiet voice. "It'll pass."

Before he could think about what he was doing, Kanda reached out and touched the skin of Lavi's forehead – he told himself it was to test for a fever. "Che. This has happened before?"

Lavi nodded, seeming not to care that Kanda was touching him, and let out a small, strangled sound of discomfort. There was suddenly a hand in his and he squeezed it just because it was there, it didn't matter whose it was, it gave him something else to focus on. He didn't have to see so he let his eye close while he tried to speak.

"Second time."

Kanda didn't care that it felt like his fingers were breaking, he only cared that Lavi was in pain and he wanted to stop it.

Usually he enjoyed the redhead's suffering. But not this time.

"How long did it last?" He asked, hooking Lenalee's chair with his foot and dragging it closer. The apprentice Bookman's eye opened and blinked at him repeatedly, seeming to not understand what Kanda was doing, his eye became round and his hand clamped a little more tightly on the Japanese man's fingers, but he didn't let go of his middle. "Che. What?"

"Are you being… _nice_ to me?" He asked as if the idea had never even crossed his mind.

"Answer my fucking question you stupid rabbit brat." Kanda sank into the chair.

Lavi tried to smile, but it wasn't a happy expression. A light sheen of sweat had formed on his brow, glimmering wetly in the sunlight from the window, and Kanda shivered at the sudden urge first to wipe and then to lick it. He felt his mouth fall open and a shiver of revolution went up his spine, his fingers tightened on Lavi's. The redhead lifted a brownish eyebrow at him, curious as to his train of thought, but he didn't ask. Instead he swallowed and settled a bit more against the bed, willing himself to relax.

"About ten minutes, tops." He answered softly. He saw the samurai nod and breathed out a shaking breath. Somehow, he was glad that Kanda was being nice to him. It was odd, it proved that something was wrong, but it gave him another thing to distract himself with for the moment. "Now… how come you're… being nice again? And Lenalee? And… everything?"

Kanda didn't look at him. His hand felt cold. Lavi could almost hear him swallow, could see his blush. He could almost see the gears turning his mind – slowly – and grinned at him. Kanda never told him secrets, never said a word about his past, never explained how he thought, never gave a note on how he felt. He never touched people of his free will, either. So when his mouth opened and no sound came out of it, when he tilted his head so his bangs shaded his eyes and the loose strands of his hair fell loosely around his shoulders, Lavi felt awkward. It was obvious that Kanda knew. It was clear on the lines of his face and the shine of his eyes. But he knew the man had limits.

"I—"

"If you can't talk about it, don't try." Lavi blurted. The Japanese man looked at him, eyes round, the slight pink to his cheeks painfully obvious in the light. A horrific thought struck Lavi then.

"Ah!! Yuu-chan! I'm sorry! It's not my fault, I swear. I never even tried to… I mean… it's not like I've tried any harder than I usually do! It's just that… it's been a really long time since we met and I'm sure that things will work out. We just have to… uh… take things… as they come and…" He had meant for things to come out better than that, but Kanda's expression told him that he had hit the nail more or less on the head. The hand in his squeezed suddenly and he opened his mouth again, hoping for more fitting words to come out. "And… things are going to be awkward and stuff but… I think we can sorta – I don't know – figure a way for… for… Yuu-chan?"

Kanda had let his mouth open and, for the second time that Lavi had seen in all his life, was blinking at him owlishly. Words, for a long dark moment, failed him utterly. "Th-then… you… how the fuck did you figure it out?!"

Lavi smiled softly.

Kanda had the overwhelming feeling that he was going to ooze into a little warm puddle of some, distant, warm fuzzy emotion on the floor.

"Lenalee has been acting jumpy around me, so that's pretty obvious. You had your hair down around her, and didn't try even to curse when she hit you. And Allen talked about you first thing earlier. So it kind of falls together."

Kanda's expression fell. "Che. How does that fall together?"

"Lenalee likes me, you like Lenalee, and Allen likes you. It's as plain as day."

Kanda's expression became suddenly so dark, he thought for a moment that his face sucked all of the light out of the room and turned it into killing intent. The samurai stood and swept his hair over his shoulders, yanking away his hand with a growl.

"I hope you die." He said so seriously, Lavi felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as if to avoid the stroke of an oncoming katana.

And then Kanda stalked away from him, opened the door, and slammed it behind him.

"Ok…" Lavi said to the empty room. "I was wrong…"

-- -- --

Kanda ran. He had never had to run from a battle. He had never had to run from anything. And yet, when Lavi had said that, it was kill or run.

And he didn't want to kill Lavi. If he killed Lavi, he'd never see that fucking retarded smile ever, ever again.

He found himself in an obscure hall in the basement, the lowest basement, next to the old dungeon like cells and storage rooms that the Order had converted. He turned a corner and smashed his back on the wall, breathing heavily, beads of sweat trickling down the skin of his jaw like cold, icy fingers. He shivered a bit – this part of the building wasn't heated and it was the dead of winter – and brought a hand to his chest to calm his breathing. The plumes of white that formed around his mouth didn't reassure him anymore than the distant sound of a footstep did; no one had any right to be here, even him.

With a hard swallow he glanced back the way he had come and saw nothing, just gas lights, not even a shadow. He knew it was stupid to think Lavi might have followed him, but the thought was still there. He looked down the turn he had chosen, noting that the lights faded when the corridors became completely unused, and started that way. He would hide in the dark until he calmed down and didn't want to kill people anymore. It was safer than any of his other options.

He walked quickly, more or less silent but for the panting of his breath, until he came to a place where the light didn't reach. With one hand holding his sword to keep it still and the other keeping his unbuttoned jacket collar closed, he found a flat, nearly formless wall to lean against, cooling his temper as well as his back on the stone.

The footsteps in the distance faded away to nothing.

He was alone.

A second wave of shivers trembled from the base of his spine to the crown of his skull and he sank down on the floor, drawing his knees to his chest. The cold didn't bother him, never had, and the dark made him forget what he would have seen in the light.

"Fuck."

He hardly whispered it. The sound still bounced off the nearest wall and came back to him, and with it came the memories.

Lavi thought that he liked _Lenalee_?! The fucktard had lost whatever cells that functioned as his brain if he really thought that. And Allen?! Allen The Naïve Twelve-Year-Old was supposed to like him?! What the hell was Lavi _on?!_ The redhead obviously didn't even _think_ if he thought all of _that_ was possible!

"_Goddamn it…"_

And what had been that warm melting feeling when he had thought Lavi had accepted him? That wasn't _lust_ for sure. He hadn't felt a sudden tightening in his pants or a rush of blood or even a tingle – there had been a freaky feeling of total and complete lightness, a buoyancy that made him feel like a cloud might, or a hot air balloon, or a little pink ball of sugar that had been placed in a pleasantly heated pan with a dollop of butter. He had never felt like that before, not for any reason. And when he thought back on it, his stomach felt as if it were crawling on the inside with tiny winged insects, flapping all at once, and his hands felt cold.

But then again, it _was_ cold; so maybe the hands were just a side effect.

The strangest thing though, was that thinking about it, that… _fluttery_ feeling, made him feel oddly, annoyingly passive.

"Shit."

He leaned his head back and thumped his fist on the ground. Both hurt. Both would have woken him if this was a nightmare. He brought the hand to his face, not that he could really see it, and glare at it, aware that he had held Lavi's with it, felt his skin, absorbed his sweat. He wished, deep in his stomach, that things had been different.

_I'm an idiot. I know I like him but I still want to kill him. But I don't want him to die. But… I still want to… I want to…_

He brought the hand to his face and touched his own skin, remembering the touch of Lavi's forehead under his fingers.

_Why the fuck do I like him?! Why the hell do I care?! Why the shit did I do what he asked me to in that godforsaken tavern? I should have just let him die there! Alone and…_

_Alone and…_

_Alone…._

_I left him alone._

He stood up far too quickly, his right heel had been clumsily placed on the back of his jacket and he hadn't felt it, he hadn't even worried about it, until it was too late. His own weight jerked him backward, throwing him off balance, and he tilted toward the wall with far more speed than he could possibly react to. His skull collided with the stone with a sickening crack and a blade of light flashed in front of his eyes, first red, then yellow, then dazzling, sparkling silver. A short sound of pain escaped his mouth as his teeth closed on his tongue with enough force to make it bleed. The flavor never quite registered in his mind until he hit the floor, arms to either side, feet tangled awkwardly under him, face turned against the freezing, surprisingly smooth floor. His eyes were moving and he could feel them rolling upward, slowly but surely becoming useless, loosing sight of the generic black walls that ringed this lightless corridor.

_How could I leave him alone in pain like that?_

-- -- --

"I hate this." Lavi groaned from under his blanket. Not only had the feeling of discomfort spread up his chest, across the back of his shoulders, and finally to the top of his ears, there was also the sinking feeling in his stomach that he had read into everyone's actions entirely _wrong._ He kept his pillow firmly pressed over his face, bent at the middle because it didn't seem to make it any worse. He wanted to _think_ about he had thought everything through and come to his conclusion so he could poke holes in his logic, but that didn't seem like it was going to happen with his skull ripping open down the middle and spill his brains out across the sheets.

He felt something too hot and wet to be imagined on the side of his face and let go of his pillow enough to touch it with his left hand and bring his fingers in front of his eye.

"Crap."

His head was bleeding.

As if the sight of it cued some part of him, the pain in his stomach faded to a distant itch, a dull ache that paled in comparison to the agony running ramped in his skull. Hunching over, he reached with bloody fingers toward the call button, because this was too much. Because, if this kept up, he'd suffocate himself with a pillow rather than feel it. Because skin didn't just decide to bleed all of a sudden without reason.

When his fingers found the button on the wall he pressed it four times before he let his hand drop, though he kind of figured it would not convey his urgency. It hadn't been this bad when Yuu was here, holding his hand, being nice, blushing so innocently, but he couldn't analyze it with a loud ringing in his ears and the sensation that, as nice as it was to have a pillow on his head, he needed to get it _off_. He pushed the plushy object away and paused when he glimpsed starlight through his window, silver and soft. Was it that late already? Time was a quickly consumed commodity with the Black Order, but he had never seen it move quite that fast.

The eye of a waxing half moon filled the room with frosty light and wrenched a strangled, pained cry from his throat.

He heard something rip. He _felt_ something rip. He didn't know what it was.

Everything sounded funny. He could hear the nurse breathing outside of the door and felt some part of him shift to listen as she opened the door. The precursor to a gasp, the slow air as her lungs fought with inertia, was something he heard for the first time since he could remember, as well as the swishing sound of her dropping a foot back, and the click of her tongue in her throat as the door shrieked open. He didn't know what had happened to him, he couldn't see, but he knew he was a bloody mess. And he knew that whatever else she saw frightened her.

"Matron." He voice was heavy from breathing raggedly, and when he turned his head, he sensed that same _part_ of himself shift again to accommodate him. She was blinking at him in much the same way that Kanda had when he had come in; he was a creature no one had laid eyes on and they were all mystified upon meeting him, or so his brain said to the expression. "Something is wrong." He said flatly. "My chest and stomach hurt and now it doesn't even feel scratched, but my head… I think something…" He reached up to run his fingers over his ears and into his hair.

But he didn't have ears.

"What's…" His hands slipped a little higher, pausing when they found little bumps of softly haired flesh that he hadn't remembered being there, and progressed on after a moment. The left bump flicked as if the touch tickled, making him want to shake his head, while the right stayed relatively still until he found the almost triangular tip. He felt his mouth fall open. "What the _fuck_ is going on." It wasn't a question. It was a demand for answered.

The Head Nurse reached into the folds of her apron and, with shaking fingers, drew out a compact. On reluctant feet she approached him, offering the little case from as far away as she could. When he took it she stepped away again and made for the medical supplies in the corner, undoubtedly intent on cleaning the blood from his face and hair, changing the bedding as well as his clothes. Why she was so quiet about it made Lavi scared, it increased the rate of his heart a bit, made his hands feel numb, but that did not stop him for gingerly opening the case and turning the little piece of reflective glass toward himself.

For a moment he was entirely silent, staring at the new additions to his facial features with one perfectly round eye that refused to comprehend what had happened. Physically, he knew, it should have been impossible. There was no way for something like that to happen so quickly, not without some sort of assistance from evil or Innocence or some other force they hadn't had to deal with. And even if it had happened – which it obviously had – there were innumerable problems with it, as well as the problem that he _had not_ been bitten by a creature that looked like he did. There was, he realized with a slow, shuttering sigh, something even more complicated going on here than he had thought.

"Head Nurse." He asked softly, closing the compact as if the act would hide his new look from sight. She looked back at him with a raised eyebrow, her hands filled with rubbing alcohol and cotton balls and gloves and tongs and a few other things he didn't know the names of, her expression was calm now, if a little amused, and he frowned a little at it. Trust someone in the medical profession to take pleasure in his expression of discomfort. He sighed and touched the right side of his head, cringed when his fingers still found that now drying bit of new flesh. "Ever… seen anything like this happen before?"

She nodded, a little smile coming over her face. "Only once."

"How'd ya handle it?"

"It went away in time."

He frowned deeper and her smile grew even brighter; his pout became darker at her reaction and she laughed at him. "What's so funny?"

She grabbed his chin and tilted his head a little, giving herself access to the blood on the left side of his face. Her latex covered fingers were gross on his skin but he didn't complain about it. "You'll have to wear a hat for a few days… unless you want the world to know what you're feeling."

He sighed. "This is not my day…"

-- -- --

Reever had watched Lenalee walk into her brother's office nearly an hour ago, seeming half chipper and half worried. He had expected to see her come out again relatively quickly, and half expected Komui to follow her out crying because she was admitting her undying affection for someone, but neither happened. The office, it seemed, was entirely still.

He was so engrossed in this thought – pushing his calculations into the part of his mind that could do them without him having to think consciously – that he almost didn't notice the hunched over, hooded form of an Exorcist sneak in front of the partition of his desk, moving as if they wanted to go as unnoticed as possible. He did notice, however, and reached out to take a firm hold of the lurking boy's jacket and give it a warning little tug.

Lavi's _eep!_ sound made the one-eyed glare he got _more_ than worth it.

"What the fuck, Reever?" Lavi hissed at him, pulling his hood more tightly around his head. The fabric _annoyed_ him beyond reason. He wanted nothing more than to yank it off and scratch the sides of his head for an hour, but he had to resist the urge. It was the only way to be sure he got rid of his… _things_ before someone saw and insisted he keep them. "Can't you see that I'm busy?"

"Sorry, Lavi. Just wanted t'make sure you aren't a delinquent with your hood up like that. I can't really see, ye know?" Reever answered with a lift of his lips. The redhead tried to keep his face calm so the top of his skull didn't do anything funny in answer.

"Is Komui busy?"

"Talkin' to Lenalee."

"Good." He made to stalk away.

The door behind him, at the end of the hall, opened with such a force his hood twitched right off at the sound of it banging into the wall.

Thank the Lord no one looked at him.

Except for the person who had opened the door.

Which was Allen.

"Help." The British Exorcist said gaspingly, shouldering a burden that Lavi had not noted in his moment of horror. The white haired boy held a dark haired, black and red clad man over his arm, feminine features drawn into a motionless expression of unconsciousness. Kanda. Kanda was immobile in Allen's arms. "I think…" He said after he had breathed in maybe twice. "Kanda tried to kill himself."

"_Fuck you… Moyashi."_ The samurai mumbled without opening his eyes. _"I told you… accident…"_

"Right, Bakanda." Allen said almost too lowly for Lavi's improved hearing to pick up. "I totally believe you."

* * *

**Ooooh! A cliffyishthing… I think.**

**I would like to thank my beta, Dark1408, who I always forget to mention. And say that if you can figure what's going on with Lavi's… erm… **_**things**_**… you get 12 virtual hugs from me. Or something. :3**

**I am going to Yaoi Convention in San Francisco this weekened, so please do not expect ANOTHER update between now and then. The likelihood is entirely too minimal to comprehend. Also, thank you all SOOOOO MUCH for reading and reviewing. :D**

**I apologize for nothing telling you more this chapter. Things will go well from here, I swear!**


	5. Metamorphosis and Abnormality

**I was goooooone. And I had to sleeeeeeeep. And I'm sorry this is laaaaaaaate.**

**I do not own -man. If I did… (curses colorfully)! And there would be way the (bleep) more episodes.**

**WARNINGS: Cursing. And homoness. And Kanda being a love-struck stupid assface.**

**

* * *

  
**

Part Four: Metamorphosis and Abnormality

Kanda shifted in Allen's hands and found himself painfully introduced to the control room floor. He knew that the British boy had brought him here simply because it was closer than the medical wing and he could most likely get help if he needed it, but it was still embarrassing. Every time he opened his eyes, pain would sear through his skull and dull his senses, threaten him with nausea and a feeling of vertigo that made his jaw clench horribly. He knew he needed a bag of ice and a quiet, dark place to shade his eyes for a few hours, and then he would be fine, but the stupid brat hadn't listened to him. Now, with his face pressed to the wooden floor, eyes held tightly shut, he had to fight down the feeling that at any moment, he would vomit all over Allen's feet. True, he hated the boy, but that wasn't a good reason to throw up. There never had been a good reason to throw up. He cracked an eye open and suddenly had a reason.

Lavi was here.

"_Fu…ugh…"_ He couldn't even curse anymore.

"Yuu-chan!"

_Don't call me Yuu-chan._ He tried to push himself up but moving made the floor tilt sickeningly, like the deck of a ship, and he lurched at it, drawing his hands to his head. There were suddenly people everywhere, all around him, and he was drowning in a sea of questions, deafened by a chorus of demands. A few moments of it and someone touched the back of his head; the pain made his stomach clench and he gagged at it, eyes opening to the roiling room around him. Lavi's boot wasn't six inches from his face and the sight of it made him worry.

The sound died down as Allen began to explain to Reever how he had found Kanda in the hall. The samurai let his left eye stay open while gentle hands turned him onto his back. The boot was gone, but he didn't see Lavi. Instead he felt his throbbing head placed at just the right angle on something soft to keep the pain from exploding through his skull again and a palm pressed into his right shoulder.

"_Fuck…"_ That time it came out as a real word. Why did everything have to spin every time he hit his head? Was it because he hated spinning more than he hated sugar cubes? _"Shit…"_

"You're fine, just a massive concussion I think."

"_Bright…"_ He grumbled the word without thinking and pair of hands pressed themselves over his eyelids. To his horror a chuckle erupted from his throat, bubbling out of his mouth as plain as any normal laugh. He felt his lips quirk and fought them down with all his will; he didn't even know what he had found funny enough to make a sound at. One hand moved down the side of his face and the other did the job of both, blocking his eyes from the stabbing rays of the overhead lights, and he sighed when the other went to his shoulder again, soothing and warm.

The world was slowly beginning to come to a halt, but it wasn't quite enough to encourage him to move. It wasn't quite enough to encourage him to listen, either.

He felt like he couldn't think. He was too far away, somehow.

"What'd you do, Yuu-chan?" A voice asked him from above. That had to be the person holding his head off the floor. What a nice person. A person who's voice he knew. In this tempest of seasickness though, he couldn't say who it was or how he knew them.

"Che… it was… kill Lavi or run so… I ran."

"Ran where?"

"Basement. Near the catacombs."

He heard the movement of air that usually accompanied a nod. "What'd ya do there?"

He breathed out a snort of air that didn't make any sound. He was glad the person talking to him was quiet, he could stay awake and not risk a coma, but he didn't feel like he had to lie about anything. The sounds around him were gradually going back to normal. Someone must have gone for a real doctor, not a doctor of chemistry or linguistics. "Thought." He answered vaguely. "I shouldn't have… left him there…"

"Naw, not that Yuu-chan. How'd ya hurt yourself?"

"Che. Stupid." He groaned, lifting a hand to the one against his eyes. It felt so nice; he wondered whose it was. He might actually stoop low enough to thank them. "Boot caught on my coat. I fell."

"That's a little clumsy for you, isn't it?"

"No shit. Wouldn't have happened if I were thinking about how much of an idiot I am."

"You're not all that bad, Yuu-chan. You're like… half an idiot."

"Then why the hell did I do what he asked me?"

"Who asked you?"

"Lavi, nitwit. Who have I been talking about?"

"Right. What did you do again? I don't remember."

"I fucking… you don't… remember?" He gripped the fingers on his eyes and lifted them enough to glance up at the person pillowing his head. It took him a few seconds to draw the face into focus being his was crowned with a hood he was not used to seeing. The redhead smiled down at him gently, understandingly, and he tried to sit up only to have himself pushed back by the hand on his shoulder. He didn't particularly want to fight it. He relaxed. "_Chikuso…_" He ground under his breath, and settled Lavi's fingers back on his eyes.

Lavi laughed at him a little awkwardly, but left his hand where it was. "I'm sorry for suggesting the wrong… thing, earlier. And calling you Yuu-hime." Lavi said softly, and his hand began to rub the tension out the shoulder under his hand as if he didn't even know he was doing it. Kanda made a low, rough, sound of encouragement, almost like a purr, and Lavi chuckled at it. Either the samurai had serious brain damage or he actually liked being touched on his shoulders, which were so tense he wondered how the man functioned. "Forgive me?"

"Che."

"_Pleeeeaaase?"_

"Fine."

Lavi grinned, bending a bit more than he had before. He could hear Allen explaining what had happened to everyone in front of Reever's desk and decided not to get involved – he was more interested in grilling information out of Kanda than anything else, the others would figure everything out.

"So…" He verbally poked at Kanda's buttons by using a tone that he was a bit childish and shy. If he did that, if he could get the man just annoyed and not inches from murderous, he might learn something. It was a delicate balance, however, and he had half a mind not to try it – needless to say the other half of his mind thought getting Kanda riled was a wonderful idea, and beat the other half in the contest for control. He smiled. "What'd I ask ya for?" He asked.

Kanda's upper lip wiggled and his eyebrow started with that righteous twitch of impending casualties. "If you don't remember, I'm not telling."

"Aw… at least tell me _when_ I asked you for it."

The Japanese man was silent, seeming to think for a long moment. He was mulling over the things he had said about himself, trying to find a way around admitting what he had done right here, right now. He didn't want to be overheard, at least, and even if he wasn't he had to screw is courage to the sticking place to get the words out of his mouth. He didn't know if he could do it. He cleared his throat. "You were dying."

Lavi's hand stiffened. "And… you did whatever I asked?"

Kanda tried to nod but grimaced when his head moved. _Too bad you don't fucking remember._

"I don't… even remember what I wanted." His fingers had cracked a bit and Kanda could see the redhead's thoughtful face looking down at him, distant, hood circled in glimmering lights. Kanda wondered what was going through the redhead's mind with that expression, and found himself glad that Lavi wasn't paying attention to him; he knew he wasn't controlling his face very well. He was looking up with his bleary eyes hooded, the gems of his irises affectionate, that warm feeling blossoming in his chest, his heart pounding with a bit more enthusiasm. His mouth was dry. The bones in his fingers felt terribly brittle and he fisted them in an effort to stop the sudden shaking that threatened. All because he had looked up at Lavi, who was touching him, and seen that expression on his pleasantly round face.

He suddenly, with the room spinning so violently, had the courage.

"Lavi, I—"

"Lavi!" The redhead's eyes drew Kanda's face into focus for an instant at the sound of his name, and the Japanese man knew that everything he felt was right there for the young man to see. And then his hood went flying back, a pale hand touching it, and the room was entirely still. Kanda sucked in a breath of air and blinked passed the fingers over his eyes, not understanding exactly what he was looking at. Lavi's face went from that strange thoughtful expression, to surprised, to terror filled.

The triangular, furry red ears on the top of his head went flat against his skull as he turned an angry look at Allen.

"What'd you do that for?!"

Everyone was blinking at him. Every scientist in the room, every Finder, every person responsible for answering phones. Kanda was staring at him. Allen was staring at him. At the end of the long room, where Lenalee had just opened the door, the Lee siblings were gaping like a pair of mindlessly steamy women.

Allen babbled.

"When I came in your hood fell off and I thought I saw something, and I wanted to know if I was hallucinating, so I just thought I'd pull it off. And… I'm sorry Lavi… I didn't know you had… cat… ears…" Allen mumbled, doing his very best to look like a kicked puppy. His pouting face, which he only used on robots any more, came to life with a simple pooch of his lower lip and a widening of his eyes, a subtle tilt of his head and a softening of his expression. It was something that had taken years too perfect, and the tiny sound of appreciation from a handful of workers let him know that somehow, even after never using it, he still had his touch. "Forgive me?"

Lavi's ears stayed flat on his head and he did something he had never had the urge to do before – he hissed.

Kanda pushed himself up, or tried to, but Lavi's hand bit into his shoulder, as if the contact made him feel better. He laid his hand on the redhead's fingers and Lavi looked at him, the digits he had been using to shade the samurai's eyes moved away, but Kanda did not seem to care. He had already healed enough that the light only increased the throbbing in his skull by a margin, not enough to make him feel as if his brain was going to explode. Lavi seemed to understand that something was wrong with him – and with Kanda – and he let the man rise to a sitting position, looking at him with his head cocked to the side, one ear toward Allen. Kanda felt his cheeks growing warm under that gaze.

_I hit my head way the fuck too hard_. Kanda thought foggily, watching Lavi's face swim like a reflection on a pond. _I keep thinking that he's looking at me like… or he'll say something like…_

"I need…" Lavi started, acting as if he was about to say something imperative. Kanda felt his heart stop in his chest and waited for the words, those wonderful words that would prove to him that the apprentice Bookman had seen that look of unfettered yearning on his face and approved of it. He held his breath. He didn't even notice that his lips parted expectantly. He didn't care that the room was filled with people. He sent a silent pray to heaven that the next words uttered from that irresistible mouth were the ones he wanted to hear.

"…to see Komui and talk to him about what the hell is going on with these ears." Lavi finished with a tiny quirk of his head. "You ok, Yuu-chan? You're… pale."

The samurai blinked a few times at the redhead. "Wha-what?" The word was air on his lips and the expulsion of it left him feeling empty. He hadn't heard what Lavi said – not entirely – and now that his hopes had been shattered he realized that the pair of ears on his friend's head was indeed very distracting. They were higher than human ears were, but not quite on the top of his skull like a cat's might be and, as he watched, the right one flicked at him. They were, when he thought about it, somehow… somehow… somehow…

_What's the word?_

"Adorable?" He said it out loud to test it.

"Yuu-chan?" Lavi's little cat ears twitched. "Did you just call me adorable?"

Kanda's stomach clamped on air. His lungs stopped. For a minute that felt like an eternity, Kanda Yuu simply stared ahead of himself in a straight line, an uncommon emotion filling his gut.

Fear.

"Kanda-kun!" The name left Lenalee's lips just as the Japanese Exorcist fell backward, his vision darkening around the edges. When his head hit the floor the room seemed to explode to him, flurries of light dancing in front of his eyes like snow, the surface of his skin suddenly hot and covered in goosebumps, his ears deaf to the world. The quarter of a second it took for him to faint was the longest he had ever known, stretching out before him in a never ending line, at the end of which was Lavi's concerned face looking down at him, furry animal ears standing out as if to hear what was wrong with him.

The last thing he felt was the strange, irritating desire to pet them.

And then the world went black.

--- --- ---

Komui sipped his coffee and tried to pretend that, as _cute_ as they were, Lenalee was _not_ playing with Lavi's ears in his presence. The redhead was trying to talk to him, hurriedly, and would jerk his head to the side whenever she touched one too delicately, as if the response were out of his control. Eventually, when Lavi was beginning to lose his self control, the apprentice Bookman turned to the Chinese girl and made a sound that wasn't human, it was more like a meow that shook – he recognized it as something felines usually made when hunting. His eyebrow twitched.

"Let him talk, Lenalee." He said at last, and the Chinese girl frowned. With a strange sort of look on her face she moved back to the couch – which the unconscious Kanda occupied more than half of – and sat down at the far end of it. Allen sat braiding a strand of the Japanese man's hair – Komui was sure he would lose a hand for it – with a gleeful expression on his face, as if somewhere along the line Lavi's pranks had rubbed off on him. Komui wanted to smile, a little.

"Anyway," Lavi said with a sigh, and scratched at his abused right…_ ear_ for a moment before he went on. He hated to say it but he was starting to get used to the way his knew sensors turned at sounds to pinpoint them; it was much easier than human ears at least, and he didn't mind that. What he did mind, however, was how he had the desire in the back of his head to smack Komui in the face because his glasses were shiny. "After Yuu stalked out and the pain went away, the wounds were gone, _these_ were on my head—" He tried to wiggle them and could tell by the way Komui's eyes blinked that be managed— "And ever since then I've been hissing at people like I did with Allen and… and… you're glasses are… reflecting the…light…" He leaned forward and reached out with his right hand only to have Komui bat it away, which in turn made him reach again. The scientist frowned as he stopped the second attack, then leaned back so his eyes weren't in the light. Lavi sighed and sank back in his chair, ears going flat. "Thank you." He breathed. "I really can't stop it."

Lenalee coughed in a way that said she was hiding a laugh.

Komui leaned back on his chair and twirled his quill pen between his fingers thoughtfully. Lavi closed his eye in an effort not to leap at the little object and _kill_ it. It was a pen. It wasn't alive. He didn't need to kill it.

"In most legends, werewolves, which – according to both Kanda-kun's report and yours – are what the town was attacked by, their affliction is spread by biting. It would seem that you, being bitten, have begun to transform into some kind of creature along the same lines as a werewolf." Komui shuffled through a stack of papers for a moment until he came to the correct one, which he laid in front of Lavi's face. The redhead opened his eye and looked down at it, not really seeing anything but a diagram of what might have been cells and black fuzzy words beside them. "From what I can tell from your blood samples, there's no new Innocence in you, no _substance_ to make this happen – you are exactly the same biologically as you were before you were bitten."

"What does that mean?" Lavi asked, lowing the paper from his face to look at the Chinese man.

"It means there is no scientific way for me to fix you."

"Oh." Lavi's voice was so pessimistic; Komui might have thought he had expected to be told it was hopeless. "What do I do then? I don't want to eat mice... they sound kind of crunchy."

"Rats have more meat on them." Allen chimed from his place at the couch. Lavi looked at him and cocked an eyebrow; the British Exorcist broke into an awkward grin, showing his teeth. "So I've heard."

Komui chuckled and pushed another paper over to Lavi, who picked it up with a morbid expression and sighed. "Though there isn't Innocence in you, but we _can_ tell that this _is_ caused by it – you are being affected by phenomena from afar."

"So it's not hopeless? I don't _have_ to keep the ears? Eat rats? Attack… glittery… things?"

"Not if you can find the Innocence and bring it back before you change into some kind of werecat." Komui chimed as pleasantly as he could. When he turned his head his glasses shined again and Lavi placed his hands forcibly on the desk to keep from swatting at them, because he really, really, really wanted to. It was the same as his desire to keep things off of his ears and the instinct to rub his face on things that he liked. Every time he looked at the Japanese man lying on the couch he wanted to rub the side of his face across his back because he liked his hair, and he wanted scratch his nails across the desk and on the side of the couch, the curtains on the far side of the room begged him to climb them. Komui spoke, distracting him from his thoughts. "I don't know what will happen if you change completely – if the townspeople are anything to go by, you'll lose your mind and it will stay lost until someone finds and deals with that Innocence."

Lavi sighed and he leaned onto his arms, pillowing himself against the Supervisor's desk. For the first time since his wounds had magically healed themselves, he felt tired. He wanted to curl into a ball next to something warm and go to sleep. "How come it's a cat?" He asked no one in particular, just voicing the question for the room. "I was bitten by a wolf so… shouldn't I turn into that?" He asked, and his left ear turned to Komui the same as his eye did.

Komui shrugged. "Maybe it has to do with your personality."

"Then he would definitely be a wolf." Lenalee chimed.

"Or a rabbit." Allen threw in for good measure.

"You guys suck." The redhead mumbled, and closed his eye, turning his head against his arms, his feet pulled themselves to his stomach, bringing him into something of a half-circle against the wood. He sighed a little, letting his eyes fall closed. "Any idea if the mood swings I'm having are part of it too?" He looked up for a moment. "I get annoyed easy, I relax easy, I get distrac—Komui, if you don't stop twirling your pen I will rip off your hand!"

Komui dropped his quill. "Sorry. You'll just have to try and learn to control yourself, Lavi." His words, though logical, were somewhat strained. He reached out without thinking and laid a palm on Lavi's head, just between his two ears, and the apprentice Bookman tensed for a moment before all of the rigidity ran out of him like water through a strainer. His eyes half closed. Komui moved his hand in a gentle petting motion and the boy sighed, and then leaned his head into the contact, letting a tiny, appreciative sound from his throat, even if it felt a bit degrading. The hand scratched lightly behind each ear and he hummed, eye falling inexorably shut. "You really do have some catlike tendencies, don't you Lavi?" Komui asked half in disbelief.

"_Gods_, Komui, if you keep doing that, I'll wanna move in with you…" Lavi cooed at the older man, his hands beginning to knead at the table a little. When an undignified moan broke through his lips the Chinese man pulled his hand back in fright. The boy looked up at him in disappointment but didn't do otherwise, content to just lie with his arms on the tabletop, breathing in heaving breaths. He didn't know what was going on with his body, why having his head rubbed was about the second best thing short of—

"You, Kanda, and Allen will leave tomorrow morning. Allen should make up for any slack you need because of this… affliction, and Kanda already knows the town. I need Lenalee here, so it will have to be the three of you. Please, as hard as it is Allen, don't let Kanda kill you." Komui said with as serious a face as he could muster when watching the British boy finish his third addition to Kanda's hair. If the samurai didn't wake soon, he would find himself with a head of braids to deal with – and knowing Kanda, he wouldn't deal well. "That means don't _try_ to make him kill you." He added, just to clarify. Allen made an accused face at him that he knew was a total lie – the kid was as innocent as Cross was, Komui-Len X had proved that.

Lavi pushed himself up suddenly and stretched, a small smile cracking his lips. Even if he didn't like the reasons for going back to town, he was still going back. Still potentially going to see that wonderful kisser that had stolen all of his thoughts. Over the past few hours he had remembered it he had tried to imagine what the guy looked like and what he would do if he ever met him, what he would say, what he would think. He hoped the man was taller, maybe by a few centimeters, maybe a little feminine being he really did like girls, with long hair and a kind face, shy and needy and perfectly dainty. If it were a man like that – like Crow-chan, only less naïve and old and _gross_ – he would be able to handle it, he had decided. If it was a manly man, a beef cake with hard eyes and a dangerous soul, things would be more difficult. He didn't see himself being with that kind of person – even manly women were too much for him.

Even so, that kiss had been…

He felt his tongue flick over his lower lip and sighed. It was enough to make him think about being with a man, so it was something.

"Great… I'll get packed. It's been a while since I've done anything without Gramps looking over my shoulder." He smiled, but even if his face was entirely enthusiastic, his ears betrayed the lie. They were a bit down turned, like a frown, and he didn't know how to right them, or control that reaction, so there was naught to be had for it. Lavi would just have to live with being readable until he got rid of them, he realized, and the thought made the expression take over his face entirely. It was a pout. And he didn't know how cute his friends thought it was.

"Is something wrong?" Komui asked with a cocked eyebrow.

"Well… speaking of Panda…I hear really well with these things so… how am I gonna sleep if Gramps is snoring through his snot?"

--- --- ---

When he opened his eyes, things around him were quite a bit softer than he remembered. The room was dim; the familiar stone texture of his own ceiling looking down at his blurry eyes like a vision from a dream. Something cold and wonderful lay across his forehead, soothing away a pain that had faded to little more than a distant ache, a vague throbbing behind his forehead, just behind the bone. He blinked a few times, willing his bleary vision to hold steady, and stiffened at the touch of a hand pulling away the wash cloth that made his skin so cool.

The cat ear sporting youth that looked down at him smiled.

"_Fuck… _Can't I wake up with a headache _once_ and have it not be your fault?" He growled, and the words brought a hundred thousand others of regret to mind. He didn't want to be here with Lavi in his room, flicking his ears in amusement, looking so… _delicious_ with his idiotic smile. Seeing the redhead was like nothing he had ever experienced before, a temptation that he had to say no to, force that made him want to _touch_ and feel and be _close_, as if he were an iron nail and Lavi a lump of magnetic charge. He didn't like it. He hated it. He wanted to pass out again if it meant waking up in his room alone.

_My room?_

"What the hell are you doing in my room?" He meant to scream it but the words came out soft, plaintive, like he _wanted_ Lavi to be there. He was going to have to meditate himself into a new tatami mat to get his brain straightened out, he knew.

Lavi smiled at him while his hands did something that caused liquid to drip and something else to clatter on the floor. "You had… I dunno, a second wave of pass-out-chemicals from when you hit your head and you didn't wake up before, during, or after the mission briefing, so Allen and I dragged you in here. He wanted to take you to the medical wing but they always keep you about a month longer than they have to, and the mission is tomorrow." He stated matter-of-factly, and he brought the cloth back again, filled with ice. Kanda stiffened a bit when he put it on his skin, but didn't protest. "You said something before it happened that I didn't quite catch."

"Che. What did it sound like?"

"It sounded like you called me adorable."

Kanda faked a coughing fit to hide his horror.

Lavi, being the veritable idiot that he is, thought he was laughing.

"Jesus, Yuu. You don't have to be so cold…"

"Shut up." He tried to make it harsh, but it didn't work, so he continued to pretend to have something in his lungs. After a few minutes he had to stop though, knowing that going on would make it worse than it was and Lavi would catch on, so he just sank against the mattress and glared. It was easy to glare, it was safe to glare. Lavi rolled his eyes at him.

"We leave in the morning. We have to go back to that town and find the Innocence before I turn into a were-thing. So…" Lavi's mouth turned down on one side, ears sagging. They pressed tighter against his skull as a hand suddenly came up from Kanda's side – nonthreatening, though he still cringed at it – and laid itself firmly between his ears. His mouth fell open in confusion and for once, silence fell out. It took a few seconds for his lips to get the message his brain meant to produce. "Yuu…chan?"

The eyes that looked up at him were narrowed and thoughtful, with only a glimmer of annoyance. "Don't call me Yuu-chan, _Baka Koneko._" The Japanese man produced the words in a conversational tone and his fingers closed on one of those furry little ears, his lips turned up a bit. Kanda knew this was bad. He knew he wasn't acting _normal_. But what did it mean if he didn't act normal? What was the worst that could happen?

Kanda's mind, as his hand moved slightly against Lavi's head, began to formulate an answer to that question.

**Worst case scenarios:**

_1.) Lavi could step on his heart, kick him in the nuts, and storm out.  
2.) Lavi could freak out and violate him.  
3.) Lavi could run screaming from the room to tell the world that Kanda Yuu was gay.  
4.) Lavi and Allen Gaynda could bash._

**Best case scenarios:**

_1.) Hot flaming sex.  
2.) Lavi could freak out and allow himself to be violated.  
3.) Understanding and affection. Ew.  
4.) A confession of love._

He let his smile widen. None of that was too horrible. He would live with it.

"Lavi." He said the name as he brought his mind back into the moment, back to what he thought he wanted to say. But as soon as the word was out of his mouth, he realized that he didn't actually know. He had no idea. There was nothing but blank, black, empty space in his brain where his words should have been. Nothing.

Absolutely.  
_Nothing._

"Yuu-chan… don't pet me anymore, I'll make you kill me…" The redhead said in a voice that was far too whiny to be normal. He had sank to his knees on the floor and now turned his head against Kanda's palm, rubbing his ears at it, seeming to have no control over the action, seeming to enjoy it. When Kanda didn't respond at once his hands pushed him a bit onto the mattress so his face pressed into the warmth of the Japanese man's chest, continuing the motion against that new surface. Kanda felt his breath hitch at the contact and sent a silent pray to whatever god was listening that Lavi did not hear his heart slamming on his ribcage.

_Fuck…_

He said the words that came to mind.

"Che. You're more like a Goddamn needy dog than you are a cat."

Lavi made an unpleasant sound in the back of his throat and laid a palm on the bandaged surface of Kanda's chest. "Stop it… don't touch me anymore…" He said through his teeth. "I'll crawl into bed with you."

"What's so bad about that?"

Lavi didn't even have time to think about how strange that question was coming from Yuu.

"You won't let me stay in your room if I do that."

"Why would you want to stay in my room?"

"Because Panda's sick and I can _hear_ the snot _moving_ when he breathes. And Link is way the hell too freaky to sleep in the same room with."

"Che. Sleep with Komui."

"I want to wake up with a fully functioning body, thanks…" He slipped another hand up next to the first and just laid his face against Kanda's chest, breathing deeply, fighting off the urge to continue the movement of his face against his friend's torso. His eye had fallen shut and it stayed that way, blocking out the light, blocking out the cold expression he knew had to be turned at him. Even if there weren't boobs, Kanda's chest felt good under his hands; warm and solid, rising and falling in a soothing rhythm. "You're safe." He whispered without thinking too hard about what the words implied.

Kanda ran his tongue over his lower lip and swallowed. Maybe he just had to take baby steps.

"What time is it?"

"Two thirty-one and forty-five seconds in the morning. Please don't kick me out."

Kanda scoffed. He scratched hard behind Lavi's left ear and the redhead _purred_ at him, his face drawn into an expression of absolutely enjoyment. His right leg lifted from the floor and thumped back down again as a needy sound broke passed his lips.

Lavi's voice was horrified when he finally managed to form words with it. "Yuu-chan... stop…"

"Why should I?"

Lavi flushed. "That's… an… erogenous zone."

The samurai, to his own amazement, managed to drown his laughter in a violent snort. He dragged his hand away from Lavi's hair, away from his ears, and rolled away, pulling the covers over his mostly bare chest and shoulder. The redhead spread out across the unused half of his mattress until his face rested on in, hands barely touching Kanda's back, and a shuttering sigh ran through him, almost like a pant. A number of imagines flashed through Kanda's mind at the sound, a million tiny thoughts that might have qualified as _fantasies_ if he had let them linger, and a minute, warm, fuzzy, soft flicker of that emotion he didn't understand. His heart did something funny, something small and _hot_, and he pressed he hand to his chest at it.

"Che. Are you going to lean on it, or get in?" He asked as gruffly as he could. The body behind him jumped a little.

"Eh?"

"Don't be a dumbass."

Lavi shifted and the hands on his back slid away, but the weight on the mattress stayed the same. Kanda wished, for a moment, that he hadn't rolled away. He wanted to see Lavi, study is face, understand his emotions. He had never wanted to understand anyone's emotions. "Did you just… tell me to get… into bed with you, Yuu-chan?" The apprentice Bookman's tone was so muddled, Kanda couldn't say that he didn't hear hope in it.

He shut his eyes, forcing himself to relax. Even if he couldn't yet find the words to say, or understand that spark in his chest, or understand how he could want to kiss the idiot and stab him for not listening, he could still try this. He could still attempt to say what he meant without the words. "I don't see anywhere else for you to sleep, idiot." He said with such venom, such annoyance, that he knew no one, not even Lavi, could hear the note of longing in his voice. He had always had a tight reign on his emotions: even when he couldn't shut them down, he could always shut them in. He was doing that now.

There were two thumps of boots hitting the floor and the sound of clothes ruffling. Kanda kept his eyes _shut_. He didn't want to think about how much Lavi slept in, if anything at all.

The bed bent and he could feel his ears burning. He was delighted by the fact that his hair covered them and the room was lit by nothing but moonlight.

Flesh brushed his shirtless back. The covers tussled. There was breath, hot, moist, irresistible, puffing in his ear.

"Thanks, Yuu." Lavi's voice sounded a little more quietly than normal, and then there was something warm and wet on the side of his face, _lapping_ at him.

Kanda turned.

Lavi shrieked in horror and made to fling himself off of the bed.

"Did you just _lick_ me?!" Kanda didn't have to try and sound irate. _Irate_ and _shocked_ had the exacted same tone quality; he simply had to speak faster. His words stopped the Bookman in training from actually moving from his place, both hands held up over his face in something that must have been, if he could really feel it, embarrassment. Sapphire eyes, made black in the semidarkness, caught his midnight emerald one and every ounce of blood drained from Lavi's face.

"It's not like I did it on purpose!" Lavi half-shrieked at him. "It just… happened! Like the ear thing! Not my fault, I _swear_!" He moved both hands from his face without breaking eye contact and grabbed firmly on the white sheet. Kanda was leaning toward him, very close, his glare far more intense than usual; Lavi pulled the covers to his throat and wondered vaguely if he had seen Mugen. "Yuu I'm… it's not… you're… sor…" He felt more naked than he had ever been in his life under that gaze, even in his boxers. He had to tell himself for a moment that this was a dream, a nightmare, and Kanda was not looking at him like he was something sweet and delectable he wanted to eat up, he was being _glared_ at. But it wasn't a normal glare. It had an undertone to it that made his heart leap into his throat.

_What the hell is he doing?_

Kanda's tongue appeared from behind his lips and ran a slow, searing line across his cheek. Lavi was too shocked even to stammer a negative. The Japanese man pulled away and his face broke into an awkward smirk, eyes dancing with evil, and he tossed his loose hair – the top layer of which he hadn't yet noticed was braided – over his shoulder before flopping down again against his pillow. "And now we're even." He said in his most logical tone. "Go to sleep." He rolled away again, violently yanking the covers nearly over his head.

He promptly stuffed two knuckles in his mouth to keep himself from cursing like a sailor.

He realized slowly how completely out of character he was acting, how unusual he was being, how oddly _nice_. There was naught to be done for it though, after hitting his head, sleeping badly, skipping dinner, he was _asking_ to lose control of himself. He was _asking_ for Lavi to figure it out. He was being impeccably _stupid_. He had even thought, for just a moment, a single bit of time, that he _wanted_ Lavi to know.

_Shit._ He thought as the body behind him rolled enough to press firmly against his spine. The redhead, being his comfortable self, snaked an arm over his chest and released a delicate, sleepy sigh. _Suicide. It's the only way out. I don't give a damn if I don't find that person, if it gets me out of this – _His lips parted in a tiny gasp as Lavi began to press his face into the turn of his shoulder. He knew he should yell at him and threaten him, tell him to get on the floor if he was going to be a faggot, but he couldn't make himself. There was that inviting feeling that he wanted this, had wanted it for more than two weeks, and just hadn't been fool enough to be a fool over it. He slowly, shakily, with his heart speeding away like a hummingbird's, pressed himself back into the redhead, and trembled more violently at the brush of legs on the backs of his.

_Please don't wake up. Please. Just stay this way until I can tell you. Just hold on and silently let me know that you're there…_

He relaxed until he thought his bones would slip out of place.

"Yuu-chan?"

His spine went rigid. He had thought the redhead had fallen asleep already. "Enguh?" _What kind of sound is that?!_

"You're… ok? I mean… you're being nice and… I'm touching you and... You hit your head twice today but… I don't think that's reason enough for us to be…" Lavi trailed off. Kanda knew that the redhead meant to say that they were near spooning but didn't want to be killed. Kanda Yuu did not spoon. Kanda Yuu killed people who tried to spoon. The samurai – with his emotions pressed down to roil violently in his gut – thought of a response.

"Che. Just go to sleep, Lavi. You talk too much."

For a long moment Lavi was silent again, his breathing coming in slow, soothing waves. The rhythm, coupled with the warm press of his body against Kanda's, the softness of his well muscled chest, and his willingness just to be this way made the Japanese man slowly will himself into relaxation again. He tilted back and the redhead's hand brushed across his stomach until it settled on his hip. "…ok…" It was so small; Kanda knew at once that Lavi was already near sleeping.

Kanda himself wasn't. He bit his tongue and stared into the wall, watching the shadows play across it with disinterest. This, he knew, was going to be a night he would never forget.

And a night he wouldn't sleep much, either.

**--- --- --- OMAKE! Crossdressing!Special! --- --- ---**

"It's a what?" Kanda was incredulous.

"It's a cheongsam." Lenalee was excited.

"It _looks_ like a dress to me."

"It's better than a swimsuit, right?"

"It's… pink."

"It's rosebud!"

"No fucking difference."

The Chinese girl sighed and flapped the garment at him as if tempting an angry bull with it, watching his eyes flick at the movement of the cloth. It was the perfect plan, she knew, in getting Lavi to look at Kanda with at least half-interested eyes. Of course she wouldn't tell Kanda that it was indeed a dress, nor would she tell him that it was indeed _pink_, nor that it was made for an exceedingly flat chested woman. She would pretend that it was as manly as he needed it to be to get it on him, and then some.

"Just put it on." She said exasperatedly. She flung the silk at him and turned pointedly away, aware that he would catch it out of instinct rather than an actual desire to stop it from hitting his floor. "You asked me to help you, so I'm helping."

"Che. I didn't ask you to help me."

"Fine. You asked me to plan."

He didn't answer, but the sound of fabric falling to the floor was entirely too recognizable. She waited until he made a grunt of completion before she looked at him.

The silk hugged his hips perfectly, the high collar set off the angle of his jaw, the feminine tilt to his shoulders exaggerated. She clapped her hands together at the sight of him, which made him glare; she smiled back with all of the joy in her heart. "You look fantastic!" She chimed with a girlish bounce of her feet. Kanda did not look half as enthusiastic. "Now let me do your hair!" She magically produced a brush from somewhere in the folds of her uniform.

Kanda made a decidedly disagreeable face and sank down on the edge of his bed. "If you tangle it…"

"I know, I know." She waved off his threat. Hurriedly she clamored onto the bed behind him and pulled a brush from somewhere within the lack of folds in her clothes, grinning like a madwoman, and laid her fingers on the turn of his chin. He allowed her to tilt his head back with a tiny growl and she began, humming, to do her work.

Kanda tried to ignore what was going on with his hair so long as it didn't hurt. It didn't matter what she did, this was all for the sake of his future and, given luck, Lavi's. He growled when he felt his hair leave his neck and she made a sound to encourage him, just on the edge of hearing. It was ten more minutes before she sounded satisfied. He stood at it and moved with a swiftness that told of his anxiety – if not his hope of finding something attractive when he peeked into the looking glass.

When his eyes found the reflect surface he was silent for a long, cold moment.

"Che. What the fuck did you do?"

Lenalee made a laughing scoff. "I put your hair in pigtails, Kanda-kun."

The Japanese man turned back to her gracefully, wisps of ebony hair dancing in the slight breeze he caused, dark blue eyes shining, delicate features drawn into a picture of elegant anger. He didn't know how very wonderful it made him look, and feminine, or at least he didn't seem to until he opened his delicate mouth and spoke.

"I look like your fucking sister." He groused in a voice so course it almost made the Chinese girl laugh at the juxtaposition of it and his appearance. The man looked like a dark haired angel but spoke the words like hellish curses. "Take them out."

"Kanda—"

"_Take. Them. Out. NOW._"

She shook her head and sighed.

Just when she had gone to approach him, the door of the room burst inward, an excited redhead with an eye patch being the unstoppable force behind it. "Yuu-chan! I found you're bo…" His eye went first to Lenalee and then to Kanda, round with shock, and the wad of white undergarment in his hand went sliding to the floor. He visibly paled, then turned red, then paled again, blinking repeatedly. "Sss…st…" He floundered for the right word, swaying on his feet for a moment, before they gave out on him and he fell to his knees on the stone floor.

Lenalee stared at him with wide gray eyes, seeming almost as surprise as Lavi was.

Kanda didn't manage to reign in his expression of utter surprise and mild embarrassment. The samurai began to blush.

And that was the end of Lavi.

The redhead fell solidly back onto his spine and gasped at the small geyser of blood shooting from the end of his nose. _"…St-striiiiiiiiike…"_ He finally managed, and his left eye glazed over with a haze of genuine lust.

Kanda turned to Lenalee with an expression that might have looked the face of murder incarnate.

"What?" She chimed with a girlie smile. "He noticed, didn't he?"

* * *

**If you think Kanda is OOC, no worries. He will be back to his… nearly old self as soon as the head trauma wears off. And he wakes up next to Lavi. XD**

**-giggles-**

**I hope you liked it! Thanks for reading!**


	6. Confession and Compassion

**Kanda is normal…er… for at least a little while. XD**

**And Lavi is soooooo dumb. I do love dummies though. 8D**

**Thank you all of you wonderful readers and reviewers! It's great to see that people like humor still, not just angst. :)**

**Disclaimer: I do not own -man. If I did… there would be so much sex and death, my old high school English teacher would buy it as a literary reference.**

**WARNINGS: AN ERECTION! If you think this deserves and M-rating, PLEASE tell me and I will make it so. Other than that… boy's being sexually attracted to each other. CURSING. GODDAMN IT! KANDA NEEDS TO FUCKING STOP SAYING ALL OF THOSE SHITTY EXPLETIVES!**

**

* * *

  
**

Part _FIVE_: Confession and Compassion

Lenalee shifted on her feet in front of Kanda's door, wondering what on Earth she was going to say when it came open. It was odd. She had caught an early breakfast and found Allen in the cafeteria – avoiding Link as best he could in the hope that he could leave the man behind if they got out early – but Kanda and Lavi were nowhere to be found. It seemed that the redhead had indeed found somewhere else to sleep the previous night and she hoped beyond hope that it had been in Kanda's room. She couldn't imagine what the two of them might have done, what Kanda might have said, but she could imagine how her angry friend might change given the chance to open up to the young man he cared for. So she took a slow, deep breath and knocked her knuckles against the wood of the door.

Lavi lay with his arms twined merrily around Kanda's middle, his head buried in the silky tresses of the samurai's ebony hair. He felt warm, happy, content, rested, and his brain was wandering the half-existing dream world that, when a knock sounded at the door tugged his eye half open, made him believe that the man beside him was none other than a woman of his dreams. Maybe the one that had kissed him in that town. So hot. All that hair. Without his knowledge his right hand drifted lingeringly up the smooth surface of his bedmate's stomach and paused where her delicious boobs should have been – because a good morning squeeze always made for pleasant hellos. To his dismay, however, the body beside him shivered at the touch and his fingertips found nothing but the minute bump of a nipple beneath a swath of what might have been fabric. A tiny frown took his face.

_Oh…_ His brain said to him in a slow, sleep voice. _I forgot that I was kissed by a guy… then… who am I sleeping next to?_

A second knock sounded. The man beside him rolled in his direction and a pair of startling sapphire eyes cracked at his face.

They were silent. Lavi's arm stayed draped around the samurai's ribcage. Kanda blinked.

On the other side of the door, Lenalee was growing impatient. She turned to Allen with a raised eyebrow and he shrugged, rolling his eyes, so she looked at the door again. With a sigh she hit it a third time – because yelling wasn't a good idea quite this early in the morning.

The last hit on his door shocked Kanda entirely into awareness – he hadn't been sleeping more than fifteen minutes, so dragging his mind out of his rather pleasant dream was more difficult than it should have been. He took in the sight before him hurriedly, recounting the events of the night before in his head as he did. Lavi had needed a place to sleep so he had offered his bed, and now the cat-eared redhead was sharing his pillow and looking at him with an awkward sort of twitch to his lips, half-innocent and one-fourth evil. Kanda had the sinking feeling that the apprentice Bookman had done something horrible to him during the short bit of sleep he had gotten.

"G'mornin' Yuu-chan!" They were words that made his chest feel tight. He shifted a bit as if to answer the door and stiffened at the realization that, even if Lavi hadn't done anything, he was in no position to be removing himself from bed in the presence of others. The warmth of a body beside him – Lavi's body – had gathered his blood in his groin.

"Answer the door."

"Why do I have to answer it?" Lavi's ears pouted with his lips.

"You're on the outside. Answer the fucking door." Kanda growled. It was a half-truth. He sent a silent prayer that Lavi would just do as he asked and didn't try to be a smartass about it. The last thing he needed was to have Lavi figure him out _now_ rather than when he _knew_ what to say.

The redhead rolled his eyes and moved himself out of the bed. The dark haired man let out a slow, deep sigh of relief. With Lavi out of the bed Kanda sprawled himself backward in the covers and closed his eyes, focusing on the sound of footsteps as Lavi crossed the space to the door, willing himself to think only of platonic, angry, normal things. It was easier now, being his head didn't hurt, and before long he had thought away the lump in his boxers, thought it away as well as the twisted desire to be nice. He heard the door open but he didn't raise his head at it, didn't open his eyes, and didn't think; he simply willed himself back into the cold, hard persona that had always worked no matter the situation.

When he opened his eyes, Allen was looking down at him.

"You look bloody terrible." The white haired teen comment with a little amused expression, kind eyes laughing; Kanda narrowed his gaze at him.

"Che. I'd rather look terrible than look like you." He bit back with the hardest glare he had made in weeks. Allen smiled at him, softly, and a soft little laugh parted his petal pink lips.

"Kanda's ok! He insulted me!" Allen chimed over his shoulder.

"Was my health ever in question, Old Man?"

"It was when you ki—OW!" Kanda pushed himself up just as the side of Lenalee's clipboard connected with the back of Allen's head, thus stilling his mouth. The British boy glowered at the Chinese girl, who smiled sweetly back at him, before he huffed out a sigh. It seemed to Kanda that the two of them were allies as long as Lenalee hit Allen when he misbehaved, which made him smile internally; he had never marked Allen as a masochist.

Kanda tossed back the covers without regard for the fact that he was in his boxers and threw his legs over the side of the bed until the balls of his feet rested on the floor. From the corner of his eye he watched Lavi scamper for the clothes he had left on the ground the previous night, smiling at Lenalee and Allen as if he felt awkward lacking so much clothing, and mentally shivered. The redhead's skin was more or less the same color on every part of his body – no lines from his jacket or shirt sleeves – and Kanda made a mental note of how thin his waist was, how his hips flared out to his backside. He didn't let the observation go to his head, but he decided to keep it in mind to think about later.

Meditate on.

Doodle in the margins of his mission reports.

He massaged his temples in an effort to clear his rapidly fogging head.

"_Anyway,_" Allen suddenly said the word to Lenalee more than anyone else and she smiled back at him sweetly. After a moment the weapon left the side of his head and he turned his eyes back to Kanda. "How did you two sleep? I never expected to find you in your boxers…" He raised his eyebrows suggestively. Kanda glared at him openly.

"Che. That fucking rabbit brat snores." He looked down at his arms and began to brush at them, a deep scowl taking his features. "And clings. And does annoying things he claims are beyond his physical control." At the words Lavi turned to him, still buttoning his pants, and smiled sheepishly.

"I _really_ didn't mean to lick you."

"You _licked_ him?!" Allen practically shrieked the words. He put both of his hands over his mouth and looked at Lavi, which in turn meant he missed the look of horror that blossomed suddenly across Kanda's face. Kanda hadn't thought too hard about that part of the evening, how he had returned that fiery, wet touch with one of his own, but thinking of it know made him want to roll over on the mattress and mentally punch himself. He wasn't stupid enough to actually physically take out his disappointment on his body, but he would mentally do it in a situation like this, quietly. Healthier? He didn't know. But it didn't leave a mess. "And you're _breathing!?_" Allen went on as if the observation were one to be written about in the history books.

Lavi tugged the tight black fabric of his shirt over his head and chuckled. "I guess that just proves how much Yuu-chan loves me."

"Che. You have no idea." Kanda growled with a roll of his eyes. After a short pause he cleared his throat and went on, feigning a catch in his airway. "How wrong you are."

_Oh, Kanda-kun… you're so obvious…_ Lenalee thought as she looked at him grinningly, sighing at his obvious ineptitude. By the end of the mission Lavi was going to know exactly what had happened – if he didn't the apprentice Bookman was far too dense to be in his line of work. She became suddenly happy that she had decided to see the trio off. "You should be nice to Lavi, Kanda-kun." She said brightly, hugging her ever present clipboard against her breasts. "You never know when your tight-knit friendship might surprise you." She cocked her head to the side at his glare, ignoring the murderous intent behind it, and turned gently on the balls of her feet. She faced Lavi, most of her weight on her right foot, and Allen wandered around behind the redhead, his eyes focused on the wood of Kanda's dresser.

Lavi and Kanda exchanged a glance. They didn't know what was going on – or at least Kanda hoped he didn't – but both of their friends were acting rather strangely.

Kanda decided it was best to defuse the situation before it exploded in some strange, embarrassing way. "Che. Why are you even in my room? Would you all get—"

Allen screamed when Timcanpi flew from the inside of his jacket and into his face, making him stumble backward into the waiting redhead. Lavi moved forward, hands extended, and Lenalee's undoubtedly twitchy left foot shot out to catch the turn of his right ankle, which thus sent him flying for Kanda's face. It was perfect, if slightly messy, and it would have worked on someone with slower reflexes than the Japanese Exorcist whose lips they were aiming for. He knew he should have presented his mouth to the man flying at him, but there was no stopping years of training and a desire for facial preservation; he lifted both hands and placed one in the middle of the redhead's chest, the other found the turn of his right hip.

And then Lavi was connecting with the wall on the far side of Kanda's bed, all of the wind gone from his lungs.

A muffled curse escaped his lips before he slid down the stone and plopped onto the samurai's mattress, pain induced tears filling his single emerald eye. His vision blurred so much that he didn't see Lenalee and Allen narrow there eyes at Kanda's reaction, nor did he see the samurai clutch his face in self loathing. Instead he heard a small, slightly angry voice mumble from beside him:

"Oops."

That was not the word Kanda meant to say anymore than Allen meant to laugh at it, but neither of them had an excess of self control.

Lavi dragged himself from the mattress and settled beside Kanda, rubbing his neck with his right hand in pain. "That's right, _oops._ What's wrong with you? You've been acting funny since…" It was obvious that he was looking for a way to word the occasion on which things had started to become awkward. "Since you came to see me in the hospital wing. It's pretty normal of you throw me into a wall but… the bed thing and the licking thing and before that you said the word adorable and it's just… I dunno, _freaky_. You weren't bit by a were_nice_ while we were in that city were you?"

"Fuck you, rabbit brat. I do one good thing for you and it has to be caused by Innocence?" Kanda responded at once. He hid the hurt quality to his eyes by shading them behind his bangs and narrowing them, annoyance poured into his voice. That, at least, he didn't have to fake.

"Or Hell freezing over."

"Che. I have reasons for what I do."

"Then why'd you let me sleep with you?"

"Because the floor is cold."

"So… you wanted me to be warm?"

"I didn't say that."

"You don't have to say it; it's the reason isn't it?"

"What if it is? What if it isn't? Should you give a damn what my reasons are as long as you have a warm place to sleep?"

"Well, yeah. I mean, look Yuu-chan, I had my _arm_ around you. It's only natural that I want to make sure you aren't losing your mind or something."

"I'm not losing my mind."

"Then why'd you let me stay?"

_Because I wanted you to!_ "Because I'd never hear the fucking end of it if I didn't!"

"Right. I believe that. You know what I think it is? I think you _care._"

Kanda bristled at the words but somehow refrained from killing the redhead that instant. He fought with himself internally for a moment, fought with himself and finally, knowing that it would undoubtedly seal his fate forever, made a terrible choice. He reached out and took the redhead by the collar before shoving him down against the mattress, an act that made Lenalee clap her hands over her mouth half in horror and half in glee, her clipboard clattering noisily to the floor. "You're fucking _dense,_ you know that?" The Japanese man seethed at the apprentice Bookman. Lavi's eye was round with surprise and fear; his fingers wound themselves around the ones that had clamped so violently on his jacket. "I'd hit you if I weren't worried about breaking my hand on your rock of a skull!"

Lavi worried for a moment that he had gone too far. "Yuu-chan, I didn't mean t—"

"How long have we known each other?!" Kanda demanded loudly, shaking Lavi with ever word, clacking his teeth together.

"T-two er… three yea-rs!" Lavi responded between jerks. Why hadn't Lenalee hit Kanda yet? He was going to die of shaken idiot syndrome at this rate.

"Right! And you don't think I fucking _care_?! You don't think I give a damn if you sleep in the hallway because of me?!" Kanda scoffed and lifted Lavi's face closer, narrowing his eyes at him. The redhead held fiercely to his hands, palms sweating, his heart pounding away in his ribcage, fear and confusion prominent on his face. He was trembling. "You don't have a Goddamn _clue_, Bookman. I _care_. Hell, I'd _die_ if it would save you that fate. I dragged your drunk ass back to a hotel in the French slums once. I carried you back to the tavern when that thing took a hunk out of your side. And you don't think I'd let you share my mattress for a night? Bull. Shows how much you know, _baka koneko. _You know shit." He let go of the gaping redhead and watched him fall back on the bed with an entirely too surprised expression on his face. Lavi was speechless, utterly and completely, and Kanda used that fact to his advantage.

Lenalee stared right past him when he stood up and made his way to the dresser. She blinked at the place he had occupied, seeming not to comprehend what he had said, until Allen was moved forcibly into her side, being he had stood in front of the dresser Kanda was intent on getting into.

Lavi, Allen, and Lenalee watched in silence while Kanda dressed, packed his things, and stomped out the door, slamming it behind him.

Lavi leaned up far enough to take Allen by the upper arm and pinch him.

Allen squeaked and batted his hand away, glaring violently. His silver eyebrows smashed together and he raised his lip in a very annoyed expression, seeming to have lost his smokescreen of politeness with the pain. "What are you doing?! Pinch yourself if you think you might be dreaming!" He produced the words in a half-voice, as if Kanda might suddenly materialize beside him under the claim of the three of them were defiling his room and take back every word he had said. The green eye that looked back at him seemed to have a similar fear, though he couldn't honestly say that he understood it. Lavi was, of them, the safest in the end.

"Sorry, Moyashi-chan—"

"Allen."

"I thought you might punch me if I pinched you… and… if this is a dream, I need to be punched out of it." The apprentice Bookman pushed himself up with a shiver that shook the whole bed, his right hand pressed to the side of his head. "This might sound really, _really_ stupid but… did Yuu-chan just say he… cared, about me?"

"_Don't fucking call me Yuu-chan!"_ The sound of the samurai's voice came from just outside the door and the three Exorcists within immediately clutched at each other for fear of it. Lenalee found herself between Allen and Lavi, no hands in inappropriate places, their five collective eyes looking terror-stricken at the door. In another universe she would have laughed at them for being scared of Kanda, but this time was different – this time he had tried to open up and failed at it like no other ever could and she didn't know what to expect as a result.

She wet her bottom lip and spoke through the line of her upper teeth, "I think he's waiting for you guys."

"So he can kill us?"

"So he can kill me and rape you."

"Haha, you have a dirtier mind than I thought, Moyashi-chan."

"You have _no _idea."

"I wish you were coming, Lenalee."

"How come, Lavi-kun?"

"Murder insurance."

"Allen pretty much insures that you'll be murdered. You don't need me."

The sigh that sounded from the other side of the door was so loud, Allen marveled that he didn't feel a breeze. They were silent at it, their hushed whispers falling to harsh breathes of barely suppressed panic. Lenalee shifted them toward the door even as a smaller, anger strained voice came through it. "We have a _mission_. Get _out_ of my room." The growl went on, decreasing in volume, and a tiny word followed the rest as little more than a hum through the wood, "Please."

"Did he say _please_?"

"I think so…"

"_Hide me! The Apocalypse is coming!"_

The door cracked open and Kanda's glaring, somewhat depressed looking face peeked in, his eyes shaded in his bangs, mouth turned down in a frown. Lavi and Allen changed their positions to behind Lenalee, rather than to the sides. "Fine. If you want to be late, be late. I'm going." He left the door open as he retreated, moving like a swift, deadly wind of unrestrained hair and red trimmed uniform, his boots clicking lightly on the stone as he went, stoic, annoyed, and _normal_. Despite the fact that he had admitted his caring and shown his heart he was still acting the same cookie-cutter part of _Kanda, _he still functioned in the same way, still looked the same. The only difference was that the three lingering Exorcists _knew_.

Kanda walked until he got to the double doors at the very front of their cathedral-like home, and pressed himself against a wall.

He was shaking violently, hyperventilating and sweating now that he was far enough away to realize what he had done, and his heart was beating nearly fast enough to break through his ribcage and bleed all over the floor. He took a slow, shaking breath to calm it. It didn't work. His brain – which he prided himself in being able to shut off during times like these – kept recalling the moment he had picked Lavi up and slammed him against the mattress. Those lips had been so close to his, twitching in fright, and he hadn't touched them. He hadn't even breathed at them. One single kiss would have been enough to make everything end well, and yet he hadn't done it – and doubted he ever would in front of others.

Instead he had had to go and scream about how much he _cared_.

"Fuck, I'm an idiot!" He didn't particularly mean to whisper the words to himself, indeed they came out sounding much more like a groan than an actual sentence, but he did mean to twitch his skull back into the wall. The slightly tender spot from the day before sent a tingle of bittersweet agony into his jaw and down his neck, clearing his head for a moment. That was what he needed – to clear his mind, calm his body, and balance his spirit. He needed to center himself as comfortably as possible on just existing.

_I am fine. He's just Lavi. So what if you spilled your guts to him? So what if he wasn't expecting it? You're still Kanda. He's still Lavi. Nothing has changed. Nothing at all. Just… be nor—_

"—anything strange recently? I mean… we all _knew_ he cared but having him say it like that… it almost feels like he's lying."

"He's not lying, Lavi-kun." Lenalee's voice came bouncing down the hall, coming in Kanda's direction. He should have pushed himself up and ran to the bridge above the train station, but his brain wasn't working at the moment, so he waited and eavesdropped. "But he has been acting strangely, so maybe you should ask him about it." The suggestion made Kanda stiffen.

_Or maybe you should push me off of a cliff._

"If he's going to tell anyone what's going on, it won't be me. I'm loud and annoying and obnoxious and obligated to tease him no matter what comes out of his mouth."

"How about his tongue?"

"_Allen!"_

Lavi spoke right over Lenalee's protest. "In all the years I've known him, I've seen Kanda's tongue when he's eating and when he licked me. Screaming aside. I doubt he'll start sticking his tongue out at me now."

_He meant kissing you, dipshit._

Lenalee sighed. "Lavi, you go on ahead, I need to have a word with Allen."

"Ooooh, I'll be sure not to tell Komui."

"It's not like that!"

"What's it like?"

The silence was enough to let Kanda know that Lenalee was glaring at the redhead. At that point the three of them finally came in line with the wall he was tucked behind, and the apprentice Bookman caught sight of him, watching from under the line of his bangs. Lavi didn't say a word about his appearance, didn't even hint that he thought the Japanese man's expression was a bit too dark for the setting, and instead simply stepped away from Allen and Lenalee. The Chinese girl took it as the opportunity she needed to take the British boy by the arm and drag him on down the hallway.

Kanda thought about running but knew he couldn't. He just stood there and waited for what Lavi would do. Even if his insides felt like they were going to turn to water. Even if his heart didn't seem to be pumping blood anymore. Even if, when his fingers twitched toward Mugen, his hands had gone numb. He still couldn't do anything but _wait_.

"Yuu-chan…" Lavi said the word when he was less than a foot away, low but not quite a whisper. Kanda shuffled back into the wall for fear of what he might do with that dazzling green eye looking up at him – up because Lavi hunched his shoulders and lost a few centimeters on him from it. He swallowed.

"What?" His voice was a strained, half-broken breath of wind, and the sound of it worried him.

Lavi scuffed his feet. His ears twitched a bit until they finally sagged against his skull, adorable and fuzzy and crying out to be touched; Kanda clenched his unfeeling hands at his sides to keep from giving in to that desire. In the darkness he might have looked like he was brooding, what with his fear brightened irises dyed black in the shadow of his hair. "I won't tell anyone about… what you said. The caring thing. But… you know that I… care too, right? I tease you a lot and stuff but… you're… yeah… anyway, I should stop before you—" Lavi didn't know what to do when a hand came up and took a firm hold of his jacket before yanking him forward.

His whole body was turned and thrust against the wall before a covered, well muscled chest pressed into his own, a curtain of half-braided silk-textured hair falling over his right arm. His fingers brushed it when they buried themselves in Kanda's jacket in surprise. It was courser than it looked, though it wasn't unpleasant. It smelled like soup and something else, something _Kanda_, and something musky like the air that cloyed around a brothel, though why that scent would be here was beyond him. Why he would be here, with one arm around his lower back and his shoulders pressed to the wall, was equally far from his understanding.

"Che." The sound spread warm, moist air down the right side of his neck. "You don't know the half of it."

It was awkward to feel his breath catch in his throat at that. He didn't want it to catch, and like _hell_ Kanda wanted it to, but it still happened. A distant, annoying flutter of anxiety and warmth alighted in his chest and he stiffened; there was no reason for him to _want_ Kanda to be pressing him against this wall.

And yet there were still a hundred thousand perverted thoughts in his mind, regardless of that fact.

_It must be the cat thing._ He thought logically. _Cats are… like rabbits, right? It's not like there's really any sexual tension here at all. Nope. Totally imagining it. Otherwise Kanda would have gutted me by now…_

Lavi swallowed hard and wet his lips before he spoke. "Then tell me all of it."

Kanda didn't move at those words, didn't lean closer, didn't make a sound. He simply breathed in a slightly deeper breath and let it out in a spiral of goosebumps across his best friend's neck.

_Yuu-chan, if you keep it up…_

"I…" The samurai began more quietly this time, so quietly Lavi had to strain to hear even with his ears. The whisper was laced with doubt and fear. _"Like."_ Oh, how he strained over that word. _"You."_ He growled out and his teeth ground together when he was finished, as if speaking those three words hurt him physically. Fingers as cold as ice were on one of Lavi's wrists, sure and biting. The apprentice Bookman smiled at them. "A lot."

"Aw, Yuu-chan," Lavi chuckled and wound his arms under Kanda's, drawing himself closer. That made the Japanese Exorcist turn nearly to putty in his hands and he smiled wider. "Of course you like me. We're friends. You wouldn't talk to me if you didn't like me!" He laughed lightly, but his hugging partner stiffened in his arms, pushing him away. He let Kanda pull back and frowned at the glare he received, then gasped at an all too familiar sting on the side of his face, harder than he remembered. He hadn't even seen the hand strike him.

He did see the fist before it hit him in the eye.

He did not, however, dodge.

Kanda ran out of patience in that moment. He didn't care if he liked Lavi – he didn't care if he _loved _him even – he had had enough of his stupidity, and the crack of his fist against that too-thick skull was _more _than satisfying. He pulled back again and got in two good punches before the redhead lifted his arms to try and defend himself, but it was too little too late; Kanda's knee found the soft spot under his ribcage. The apprentice Bookman tumbled to his knees, gasping, but the samurai didn't care. He wasn't finished. He kicked the younger man in the torso, hard, before planting the heel of his boot between his shoulder blades, thus introducing both Lavi's chin and nose to the stone of the floor, sending a short spurt of blood from between the larger Exorcist's teeth. Hurriedly he leaned down and picked the redhead up by the collar and pressed him against the wall before landing three more rapid hits to his face and chest, each one harder than the last, bruising them both. Lavi didn't even raise his hands anymore.

Lavi didn't have the air to speak, but Kanda could see the confusion in his badly beaten face. Kanda hardly felt the pang of regret in his gut – he never felt regret normally – and only paused because Lavi seemed sincerely apologetic. He kept one hand on the redhead's clothes and pressed his knee between Lavi's, effectively pinning him.

He took a slow, deep breath before he spoke. "You don't understand me." Kanda said bluntly. "I." He leaned forward a bit, keeping his grip on Lavi's collar so the redhead couldn't pull away while he still had the courage, "Like." And slowly made to bring his lips into contact with his captive's, "You."

Lavi made a tiny, horrified sound of confusion.

And promptly sneezed, bringing his forehead into direct contact with the bridge of Kanda's nose.

The sound of muffled cursing brought Lenalee and Allen back from down the hall, worry and hope decorating their faces in equal amounts. The sight that greeted them was more than two-thirds unpleasant, what with a generous amount of blood seeping from the corner of Lavi's eye and Kanda's right nostril, both of them doubled over in various types of pain. They both stared on as the Japanese Exorcist said something muffled and derogatory to the redhead, who responded with a snide bark and a half-pout, before the two of them both sank to the floor, Lavi hissing at Kanda's closeness.

"Truce!"

"Fuck you."

"Please, Yuu-chan?"

"You're a dense moderfucker." Kanda said from behind the hand that held his nose.

"And you're creepy, Yuu-chan. I thought you were gonna kiss me."

"Che. Wha' if I was?"

Lavi narrowed his eyes at Kanda, rubbing at his forehead. He studied the man before him for a moment and the two uninvited Exorcists slowly backed away, Lenalee taking a hold of Allen's hand. She had just given him a lecture on not interfering – she didn't want to go back on that so soon.

"Are you…" Lavi blinked repeatedly as if looking at Kanda were the only thing he could do. Lenalee and Allen might as well have been in an entirely different hallway with his attention so centered like that. "Serious?" He finished at length.

The older Exorcist pretended to be suddenly interested in the stone floor. He picked at the grout with his hand that wasn't pinching his nose shut. "Though' abou' it." Kanda mumbled, not looking up. _Planned on it. Fantasized about it. Couldn't get it out of my head all night…_ "Have been. Since… that town." He went on, leaving out the details. "It's why I've been… strange, I think. Crazy."

Lavi nodded at him, but didn't show his thoughts on his face. His ears were neutral.

"I'm not… used to…caring."

Lavi nodded again, slowly, ideas forming in his head. After a moment he opened his mouth to respond, every part of him willing the words to come out right. "Are you saying that… you _like_ me rom-an-tically? Or… are you just… going with your gut 'cause you don't know what else to do?" As soon as he has asked Kanda looked up at him, his expression perfectly unreadable, and ran his lower lip against his teeth. The man, for the first time Lavi could really think of, was thinking.

Kanda sagged against the ground after a moment, his loose hair hanging down over his shoulders. The words were there, _right_ there, but he couldn't make himself say them. He never would, he didn't think. His nose had stopped bleeding and he lowered his hand from it while he chewed on his lip in thought, trying to _say_ what he _thought_ so often, trying to convey a feeling he didn't really understand. After a long minute of silence, just the sound of their breathing filling the hall, he made a slow, deadly choice: he picked words that were not an answer, but still specified feeling. "The ears…" He said softly. "Make you look… c-c-c…cu… cu…" His hands gripped the ground and he hunched farther, his shoulders shook a little. _"Cute_, damn it. They make you look cute." There was another long pause in which Kanda kept his eyes averted. Lavi felt a pang of sympathy for him, knowing that Kanda had never called anything cute in all of his life. "_I_ think… they're…" His voice fell. "_Cute_."

"Really?" Lavi scooted himself closer and reached out to touch the Japanese man's hair, who shuttered under his palm. "When you say that do you mean like a kid or like…"

Kanda shook his head. _I mean I want to fuck into the wall, Baka Usagi._ "Don't touch me." He almost laughed at himself his thoughts and his words were so separate. The hand came off of his head and he missed it at once; the loss of contact seemed to remove Lavi from him by more than just a touch. So, bravely, he reached out and touched the redhead's hand, only vaguely aware of the dried blood on his fingers. "That's not… what I meant." He whispered at the floor.

"What did you mean, then? You haven't answered me at all."

_Che. You're an idiot._ His brain said for him, and his mouth tried to echo a moment later. He didn't let it, however, and instead just pulled the hand he held until Lavi leaned against his chest, as stiff as a board. "Che." It was the only sound he had anymore. A shiver ran through him when he thought about kissing the skin of Lavi's neck, and another sang through his spine when the redhead hugged him back.

"It's ok." Lavi whispered into his shoulder. "You're not used to caring, so I won't push you. I'm sure you don't even know what you want right now." He nuzzled his head forward and a palm found its way to his head, stroking first the right ear and then the left, before settling in the middle. He didn't mind the touch in the least. "I'm your friend, Yuu-chan. If you need help figuring things out, you can talk to me." He snickered, turning his head, and sighed when his head came close enough to feel breath in his ears. If that wasn't erotic, he didn't know what was. _"Damn_…"

"Che. What?"

"Can we go? I'm gonna crawl in your jacket if you don't _quit_… breathing on… _fuck, Yuu-chan…"_ A hand was working at just the perfect angle from the air, driving a bolt of enjoyment from the top of his head to the very bottom of his toes. The urge to rip Kanda out of his clothes filled him and a hot blush spread across his cheeks.

_No, Lavi. He just cares about you and you're boys and lots of other things. Ignore the cat hormones._

"What, Lavi?"

The redhead forced himself back though it was obvious that he didn't want to, every muscle in his arms shaking, his cheeks like little red lanterns. He tried not to feel awkward at the smirk Kanda gave him, nor at the knowledge that what he was about to say was entirely too much like an invitation to be hit on. Thinking about it, though, would land him wondering at his own sexuality in his current state, and he honestly didn't need that at the moment on top of everything else. "If you do that on the train ride, I swear to God I won't even touch your hair." He bluntly stated, blinking at the Japanese man in all seriousness. The pair of sapphire eyes that looked back at him was empty for a moment and then, to his mild annoyance, began to laugh at him.

"Fine." Kanda said with a little nod of his head. "Truce then?"

Lavi gaped for a moment. Kanda had never agreed to a truce in all his life.

"Yeah, Yuu-chan. Truce."

* * *

**And in closing…**

**-Dance of Fangirlish Glee-**

**I can't wait to write the train ride!**

**Thank you all for reading! Seeya next chappy. :D**


	7. Comprehension and Convolution

**And now things start to get complicated. 83**

**NOW RATED M FOR CURSING, KISSING, AND EVENTUAL (?) SEX**

**Disclaimer of D'guiltiness: I do not own D.Gray-man. If I did… um… yeah… there would be touching and stuff.**

**WARNINGS: Um… there are some, but I'd rather just move up the rating instead of spoiling it for you. 8D**

* * *

Part Six: Comprehension and Convolution

Allen watched Lavi talk animatedly to Kanda, the hood of his jacket tied firmly on top of his head to hide his ears from the public eye, and frowned. Kanda didn't seem to mind when Lavi reached out and touched the dancing ends of his hair with playful fingers, nor did the samurai respond to his words with glares of reckless uncaring. He didn't smile, but he spoke softly, occasionally moving a hand to convey the importance of his point, and paused to listen to what Lavi said back without looking at him. It was _strange_. Kanda had never acted so civil about anything in all of his life, at least not in front of Allen, but Lavi took the change in stride. And when Allen came closer, just enough to hear what they were talking about, neither of them seemed to mind.

"Really, I always thought you'd like the color blue, for some reason."

"Che. Red is better."

"Yeah, I get that now that you said you like it, but I always marked you as a blue guy for some reason."

"I told you that you know shit."

"It's not like you're easy to figure out, Yuu-chan."

The samurai was silent for a moment and then – regardless of the fact that the three of them were walking the street over the train station and people could see – reached out to take a gentle hold of the redhead's pinky finger. Allen watched Lavi look first at Kanda, who looked ever downward, and then at their hands, eyebrows pushed together under his hair. When the Japanese man saw the look he let go, turning his head away forcibly.

Lavi dropped his voice to a whisper and poked his face from under the cover of his hood, a small frown on his lips. "If you want to hold it you can, Yuu-chan. Friends hold hands sometimes."

Allen bit the inside of his cheek in an effort not to say how impossibly gay hand-holding was.

Kanda shook his head, glowering. _I can't hold your hand if you think I'm being _friendly_, idiot, that's not the point._ He thought in annoyance. "Che." Came out of his mouth.

The British Exorcist sighed and moved between them suddenly, pointing with his gloved left hand, and stopped the two from arguing anymore than they were. In the distance a train was passing into the blue-purple mist of the horizon, chugging along with great plums of white steam searing from its engine. "And…" Allen mumbled as he traced its path with his finger. "There goes our train."

"Why are we even taking a train? Don't we have the Ark?" Lavi piped quietly, looking to Allen for an answer. It was Allen who had told them when the train was leaving and where it was going, and the thought hadn't even struck him as odd until now, when they were watching the train go on its merry way.

"Well… I… honestly?"

"Yes?"

Allen kicked a rock with his boot. "There's a gate closer and Link thinks we're leaving by the Ark in two hours but… even though I'll get in trouble for it, I just can't stand to have him watch me this time. It's weird. He's nice but…I ditched him." He paused, glancing between his two friends, and waited for one of them to say something about how they had to go back and stay. Instead they just looked at him and he looked back at his boot, scraping his little rock against the icy stone of the bridge they were standing on. "Sorry." He grumbled. "It was selfish of me."

Lavi laughed good-naturedly and bent his arms up behind his head. Little clouds of moisture formed in the air around his mouth before blowing off in the breeze, dissipating as they went. "Travel's good for you!" He chimed with enthusiasm. "And I don't mean instantaneous warping. It's fun to go farther sometimes the old fashion way, so we don't mind, do we, Yuu?"

Kanda responded with a snort that didn't seem to have an opinion.

"I mean, it's cold, and we have to stand in it, but… if Yuu-chan hadn't beat me up we might not have been late and—_eep!_" The fist that hit Lavi landed rather gently on the top of his head, between his ears, and he blinked at it. The arm that connected to it was indeed Kanda's, and it stayed there even after he had noticed. The Japanese man wasn't looking at him, his eyes blinking out toward the horizon without even a hint of anger on his gentle face. Lavi pulled his lower lip into his mouth, resisting the urge to lick him from jaw line to ear lobe.

_Stupid cat hormones…_

"If you weren't stupid we wouldn't be late." Kanda said rather nicely.

"We can catch the next one. There were two, but I wanted the early one because it meant I got away from Link faster." Allen was playing with his rock again.

"Fine." Kanda spoke so calmly, so gently, that the hand he had left on Lavi's head no longer seemed threatening and the redhead took a step behind Allen, subconsciously encouraging his friend to stroke at his ears despite the layer of fabric between them. Those fingers slowly fell until they came to Lavi's shoulder and dragged him closer, very close, close enough for Lavi to feel heat radiating from the man's side. He felt Kanda shift a bit and shifted to meet him, wanting to rub the side of his face in the curve of the man's lean, pale neck.

"Yuu-chan, I'm going to—"

"Shut up, Moyashi's not looking."

"No, you're neck, I'm gonna li—"

Kanda took a deep breath and turned, closing his eyes, reaching with his free right hand, praying with every litany he knew, and placed his face just in front of Lavi's. The fingertips of his right hand found cheek and curved gently around it as if to guide the apprentice Bookman down a little, and his left arm tensed enough to keep the younger man still. It seemed to take an eternity before he felt breath on his face, warm and moist and surprised, and another half again before his lips pressed against flesh. It was hotter than he remembered (in temperature), Lavi's mouth slightly open in surprise or horror (he couldn't tell which), his hands unsteady. There were fingers on the front of his jacket, not quite pulling him forward, not quite pushing away, and he moved his soft tongue forward in curiosity until he found the cushion of Lavi's lower lip, and pressed it in curiosity. A tiny sound that he didn't understand hummed from the redhead's throat into his mouth, vibrating awkwardly.

_I want this._

He moved back enough to breathe for a moment before he renewed the contact. His right palm slipped behind Lavi's head and he stepped into him, because there was no stopping the feeling of near acceptance running through him.

Lavi, though, didn't know what to do. From the moment Kanda leaned at him he knew what was coming, but he couldn't stop it. He couldn't raise his hands and tell his best friend that holding hands was ok and kissing was not. Part of it, he thought logically, was the fact that he wanted to lick him. The other part – and this was slightly less logically – was that once it started, it felt really, really nice, so he didn't want it to stop.

_Does that make me a whore?_

It wasn't like the one he remembered, the one from their werewolf infested backward-town, but this had its own appeal to it. That kiss had been experienced. Kanda was not. He knew enough not to scrub out Lavi's tonsils with his tongue, and there was there was a genuinely sweet, hungry, curious quality to the touch, but it wasn't angelical and world shattering. It was firm and real in a way that the other kiss hadn't been. Warmth washed from his lips to his chest, like before, and his knees buckled regardless of his uncertainty, and his distant thoughts.

His hands finally decided that they didn't want to move Kanda away from him no matter what his reasons were for kissing; he liked it and there was simply no reason stop the dark haired man from doing what he was.

He pressed back lightly, and Kanda wrenched himself away with a harsh pant.

When Kanda pulled back he unleashed a slow breath and looked up at Lavi with a serious expression. He could hardly see the eye that looked fearlessly back at him, twinkling, and he couldn't make out the emotion in it at all. The fingers stayed on his jack.

"That was unexpected."

The corner of Kanda's mouth lifted over his teeth. "I told you I liked you."

Lavi crumbled with laughter. His hood fell back as he started to fall, though Kanda caught him before he could actually hit anything and lowered him behind the stone that worked as a safety railing to the bridge. No one would see him there. Allen caught sight of them but stayed relatively far away – close enough to tell them if another train came or if something interesting happened, but far enough to give them privacy. So Kanda knelt beside the cat-boy, looking at him with curious, if fearful, eyes.

The redhead looked up at him and brought a half-gloved hand to his lips. He was confused and amused. The thought of Kanda liking him was no more frightening than the thought of Lenalee liking him, really, but for the same token there was something bad going on in his head – something not normal. The stupid cat feelings were driving him mad. Kanda was _right_ there in front of him, demanding to be licked and touched, and the chain on his chest was _glimmering_ in the pre-winter light, shining like a little wiggly gem on the end of a string. He didn't know what to do. That chain _needed_ to be attacked, killed, and eaten, but he needed to have Kanda – and _have_ meant anything but hugging – but he also needed to rub his scent on the man, lay a claim, pee on the bridge so anyone who came here would know that it was his and the people near it were, too. It was all too much for him, too many ideas.

He reached out and covered the little glittery decoration on Kanda's coat with his palm.

"Che. What?"

Lavi looked at the pair of sapphire eyes that studied him and swallowed with difficulty. He was salivating. That wasn't good, was it? "I can't… I don't know… you should… gimme a sec." His ears flicked a few times, newly freed, before they sagged against his hair in defeat. Kanda noticed for the first time then that they really were Lavi's ears – near his hair, at the bottoms, were the dark hoop earrings that he wore so commonly, too low to be flicked around when he changed moods. Lavi spoke before he could study them more closely. "You _do_ mean that romantically."

"Do I fucking need to punch you again?"

"No. Just making sure."

Kanda frowned. "Good."

Lavi bit his lip, his hand still on Kanda's chest, and shook his head. Even without the chain, it was still too much. "I have… instincts right now that make me want to do things. So, I don't know what's what right now. I mean, I told you that you're hot and everything and it's true, but I can't tell you if _I_ think that or the pussy within does." His fingers bent a bit and he leaned forward, his ears perked enough to twitch sideways when Kanda grunted a little in understanding. He stopped at an awkward angle; the side of his face not quite close enough to touch Kanda's skin. "And your neck is still in danger, Yuu-chan."

"Che." Kanda turned his head to the side exposing more of his skin, and raised an eyebrow. "What?"

Cat-like reflexes made Lavi's sudden movement too fast for Kanda to follow. Kanda was suddenly flat on his back, looking up at the sky, Lavi licking from the bump of his Adam's apple to the soft skin under his jaw to the fleshy end of his earlobe, fingers pressed painfully into his shoulders, fingernails biting even through the fabric of his jack and the shirt he wore underneath. He gasped at it, goosebumps rippling up the side his throat and down his arms, and bent his knees in an effort to throw the redhead off without hurting him, because as nice as it was, they were in public. People would see. And as much as he liked the idea of the apprentice Bookman leaving kiss marks up and down his neck right now, he didn't need it. He did not need his hands on the man's hips, feeling that curve, feeling them move as he changed angles either.

"S-sorry…" The word was spoken into his ear, huskily, but the younger man didn't pause what he was doing. It confused him. "Stop me. Please. I can't—" He lowered his head enough to nibble on the edge of Kanda's jaw, liking it and hating it and praying someone would just hit him so he could stop violating someone who _cared_.

Kanda made a sound that wasn't a _groan_ so much as it was a vocalization of enjoyment. Knowing that it came from _his_ mouth horrified him and he grimaced at it. His cold hands clamped on Lavi's sides but didn't lift him, instead they held him solidly in place against his stomach, keeping him there, feeling the heat of his thighs on his stomach. He needed to _say_ something, not just moan out his pleasure, and the half-sound of frustration Lavi made assured him of that fact. As things were, with Lavi's body acting outside of his mind's control, there were words that _needed_ to be said, even if he didn't think they would come out properly.

"Yuu-chan, I'll—"

"I like what you are doing to me." Kanda whispered, and he turned his chin down enough to look at the emerald eye that glanced up at him for a moment. He saw surprise in it, fear, understanding and pain. It seemed to him that Lavi had lost control of himself. His mouth hung open for a long moment until he clapped it shut, his tongue hardly missing teeth as he pulled it into his mouth.

Lavi swallowed. "That's… um… wow, Yuu-chan, I never thought…"

"Che. You don't think. Ever. Now quit talking."

"Yuu-chan… this is awkward, though. If I don't talk I might rip off your shirt at this rate. I don't want to rip off your clothes but I still want to and… I don't want you to get the wrong id—"

"_Train!"_ The call made them both look at Allen who – for the first time since there little exchange had begun – was looking at them with round eyes, his jaw slightly slack in its hinge. Lavi smiled at him, though his left ear stayed aimed at Kanda and his right flattened itself out in annoyance, in an attempt to appear as calm and normal as he could while pinning Kanda to the cobblestones. The British boy's face flushed a bit and he looked at Kanda, who somehow managed to glare and blush at once, before he pulled his eyes away only to look again, his mouth slightly open in a smile.

"Che. You should get off of me." Kanda growled, turning an eye at the redhead still perched on his ribcage. After a short moment Lavi looked back at him, both ears pressed a bit toward his hair, almost sad looking, and blinked his now purpling eye thoughtfully. His hands pulled back from Kanda's shoulders and settled on the little tassel in the center on his jacket, the palms on his sides dropped to the cobblestones beside them. The Japanese Exorcist was keenly aware that Lavi was now sitting on him of his own will, not that he was going to complain about it.

Lavi sighed after a long moment and let his eye fall closed. "I'm sorry." He said at length, fingers tangled in that little chain he was toying with. "You're always so cold that I never thought _you_ would like me. It's… _stupid_ cat hormones! I just don't—" The man beneath him shifted and he found himself kissed again, fearlessly, head tilted downward so his mouth could fit against the older Exorcist's. It struck him then that this was _Kanda Yuu_ kissing him, really, not just anyone, not Allen or Lenalee or a stranger in an alleyway. It was Yuu-chan. And knowing that, thinking about his hair and his face, his body and warmth, filled him with a sudden feeling of fear that he had never felt before.

Because if these weren't cat feelings and it was just his own body reacting to the slow, wonderful touch on his mouth and the hand pressed into the small of his back, he was having serious issues.

He leaned away and Kanda followed him. Every physical fiber of his being told him to go with it.

But… there was that kiss in the alley…

And Kanda was getting really into it.

And his heart was going to leap out of his chest if Kanda touched his ears at all.

He pushed his friend away with a small sound of discontent – it was more at the loss of contact than it was having it in the first place – and Kanda frowned from beneath him, one arm curving around the back of his hips. For a moment Lavi teetered between kissing him back and hitting him, clawing out his eyes and burying his fingers in all of that beautiful hair, but he couldn't decide. Which action was it that _he_ wanted to commit and which was it that he felt feline desires for? He didn't know. He figured that he would never know. So he just sat there, with his hands on Kanda's chest, and stared at him.

The bridge started to shake as the train came closer to passing under them.

"Look, Yuu-chan…" He started, but he had to be sure that that was right. It didn't feel _wrong_, but it wasn't the best way to go about this and live, really. "Do you care if I… think about… this for a while?"

"Che. You mean think about out how to kiss me back? You just lean forward and—"

"No. Not that."

"What else is there?"

Lavi looked down and started kneading at Kanda's jacket because it soothed him. It was a cat thing but he didn't really care, not when it made him feel so much better than he did. His fingernails made funny sounds when they touched the metallic buttons and he liked it – he would have fun with his own later, if he was feeling catty. "Like I said before, I have instincts. I need to figure out… if I like you or if… if it's just _'Rawr! Yuu-chan, meow! Naked! Mine! Hiss!'_ in my head, you know?"

Kanda's expression said that he did not know.

Lavi sighed. "Just… it's a lot. Finding out you care, and like me, and having these _urges_ to do things that I don't understand. So, until I'm _normal_, I don't know what I want to do about how you feel. Ok?" He could actually see the wave of realization as it came over Kanda's face, darkening his features, making him frown, making the fire in his gaze burn a little more brightly. The train chugged bellow them and Lavi flattened his ears against his head at the sound of it – much louder than he was used to – and crouched downward, which brought him closer to the Japanese man. "We need to go! Talk later!" He called over the sound of it, pulling his shoulders higher.

Kanda pushed him back, helped him rise, but held onto his jacket when he tried to step away. He looked back and his _friend_ caught the shoulders of his jacket and spun him completely, making them face each other. A protest died on his lips when Kanda jerked his hood up and secured it with a hasty, delicate bow under his chin, hiding his ears from sight. He looked down at the slightly shorter Exorcist and smiled, the expression a wordless thank you to the man. He had thought that a kiss would be waiting, or something equally awkward. It had never occurred to him that Kanda might show that he cared so subtly.

"Lavi, I—" Kanda was cut off by the blast of the train whistle; Lavi threw himself forward, clamping both hands on the sides of his head to cover his ears, eye shocked wide. The samurai didn't finish his thought, too surprised by the redhead trying to crawl into his chest and hide from a noise. He did not have time to think about it, however, because there was no way for them to miss two trains and expect to find a third at a later departure time. So he gathered Lavi as best he could, turning him toward the railing wear Allen stood with his left leg propped on the stone and walked, aware that the redhead stumbled with every step until he got there.

When the whistle stopped, the apprentice Bookman didn't move his hands from his ears. The sound was so high and loud that it seemed to resonate in his skull, messed up his equilibrium, and that wasn't something he could stand to loose when he lacked real depth perception. He wanted to run away and hide but he couldn't see to, and even if he could have seen he would have fallen from his lack of balance. He hated to admit to how fast his heart was pounding from it, so much so that lifting his foot to leap onto the train seemed impossible, and he gave up trying to help when he missed the stone edifice twice. It wasn't worth it. He would rather turn into a cat person and lose his mind than get on a train that made his skull want to split down the middle.

Thus Kanda shoved him off.

Allen took Lavi's rather sudden decent as his signal to let gravity run its course, and leapt down beside him, Kanda following shortly after. The redhead stayed with his chin pressed to the top of train, unhurt, hands on his ears, unmoving. The whistle blasted again and Lavi made a distinctly catlike protest at it, bending his back as if looking bigger would frighten it away. Allen's right boot slipped as he moved up beside him, and he hit Lavi's shoulder with a little more force than he meant to; his left hand was suddenly jerked forward and he fell into the redhead, the curve of his neck came perfectly parallel with Lavi's teeth.

For the few seconds that the train continued to make that god-awful noise, Lavi lost his mind. He didn't know if Allen had touched him or Kanda or any person, he just knew that they were distracting him from covering his ears with his hands. So he sank his teeth into boy's throat and dug his nails into the fabric of his jacket, holding him still. It didn't matter what happened to the person struggling against him, nor did it matter that his eye patch was a bit crooked – all that mattered was stopping the pain and finding silence. When the sound died, he became aware that his mouth had filled with blood. Shock went through him and he pushed the unmoving body away from him, spitting, feeling sick and revolted with himself even as he licked gore from the back of his hand. Allen fell. He looked down at the boy then, terrified of what might have come of him, and paled at the small pool of blood he had caused. Guilt sank his stomach like a rock.

The British boy was on his knees, choking, holding both hands to his wind pipe. Relief followed the guilt before fear washed through him.

"Gods, Moyashi-cha—_ugh!"_ The connection of Mugen's pommel to the back of his skull stopped his words and he tumbled forward, dead weight on the roof of the train. The sputtering white haired boy looked up at the man who had struck the redhead, hair blowing in the smoke clogged air, and raised an eyebrow in question. He wouldn't have a voice, he didn't think, even if he had an airway.

"Che." Kanda intoned loudly enough to be heard over the roar of the engine. "I might love him, but this is safer."

Allen blinked at him, head to the side. "Love?" It came out broken and raspy, but Kanda paled considerably at the sound of it all the same.

"Like. A lot. Same thing." He pointed at the ladder that led down to the train car door and jerked his head at Lavi. Allen understood what he meant without further instruction and stood, one hand still on his bleeding throat, and moved toward the ladder. They were very lucky to have two trains going to the same place right in a row and he just hoped that the conductor would understand that they had missed the train they were supposed to be on and so took this one – regardless of the cat-eared boy and the blood staining both of his gloves.

--

By the time Kanda had convinced the staff of the train (using only non-violent means) that the three of them should not be kicked off of a moving locomotive, the blood oozing from Allen's neck had slowed to a crawl. Lavi had missed any major arteries, but the boy's airway was still badly bruised, so he borrowed a pillow, tugged his coat tight, and rested crossways in the seat Kanda wasn't in.

Which forced Kanda too keep the still unconscious Lavi near him.

Their compartment was small, second class, lacking carpet and cushioning, but the seats weren't too rigid and the color scheme was a pleasing combination of blue and yellow. It soothed him a little, after the insanity of the morning, and he found himself content to let sleeping cats lie for the time being.

Lie curled in his lap, in Lavi's case.

The redhead couldn't protest when he was unconscious, so Kanda tugged his hood down and laid him across the seat. He knew it was almost creepy of him to place the younger man's face on his knee, so he stole the pillow when Allen threw it on the floor in his sleep and then propped Lavi's face on his knee, because three inches of padding was much less intimate. When they were settled, his fingers moved at once to touch those little fuzzy ears. He had it bad. The moment he began to stroke his best friend's hair he knew that there was no refuting it, but he didn't really want to. With Lavi's hair moving under his palm he couldn't find a damn thing wrong with anything – it was like the world had found balance and peace.

He sighed and leaned his head back on the seat, left hand on Mugen, right on the top of Lavi's head. Allen was snoring but he couldn't say he cared. He closed his eyes and let a quiet, wonderful sense of calm run through him. If this was love – or like or being passive – he liked it. He didn't care if he had never felt it or if he didn't like people, _this_ was worth having his heart stepped on a few times. He felt light, fuzzy, warm, like he could _smile,_ but it wasn't bad, even if he didn't understand it.

"_Mmmm…"_ The sound from the redhead prompted him to stroke a little more fiercely, scratching a bit behind each ear before he settled in the middle again, soothing. Lavi blinked his eye open but didn't move, bleary-eyed as he turned his head around the compartment. "My… head _hurts_…" He reached up and touched the back of his neck before seeming to notice the hand on his ears, which he stilled with his own. Vaguely he heard Kanda's breath catch at the touch, but held on all the same. "Did you knock me out?" He asked softly, seeing as Allen was snoring loud enough to wake the dead and was sleeping through it.

"Che. It seemed the right thing to do after you attacked Moyashi."

"I didn't attack him. There was that noise and he touched me and I – I dunno – freaked out. I didn't mean to bite him." Lavi was aware that the fingers in his wound their hands together so they rested together on the pillow beside his head. He didn't mind it, physical contact was always good to him, sexual or not, but it made him a little nervous all the same. If Kanda really liked him was more the question. "Is he ok?"

Kanda shifted a little but he didn't dare look at him. The Japanese Exorcist was holding his hand, which had to be enough for now. "I think so. He patched up fine."

"Oh. Good."

Silence settled between them. Kanda's hand started to sweat. He couldn't stand it. "I'm… holding your hand, Lavi."

"I noticed."

"You don't… mind?"

"Nope."

Kanda was quiet again, heart pitter-pattering away like a humming birds. He swallowed audibly. "If you do mind—"

"I don't mind, Yuu."

"Oh… ok."

Lavi smiled. He had dropped the -chan and Kanda didn't say a word, bat an eyelash, or brandish Mugen, which was nice. A lot of the things happening recently had been _nice_, now that he thought about it. Being kissed was nice, having his hand held was nice, having his ears rubbed was nice, being close to a warm, solid body was nice, and it was wonderful to know that he wasn't going to be killed for saying something wrong. Hit or punched maybe, but he wouldn't be flat out murdered, he didn't think. Kanda wouldn't kill someone he cared about. He hoped.

Silence settled again and he heard Kanda's breathing even out. The hand in Lavi's loosened a bit, though it didn't uncurl, as if Kanda had become more comfortable than he had been. It was reassuring to the redhead, what with the things he had to say.

Lavi wet his lips and whispered into the compartment, eye focused all the way across the compartment from Kanda in an effort to avoid having his emotions read. "Oi… Yuu-chan…" He mumbled the name, then cursed himself for using the honorific. The man whose hand was in his didn't seem to notice the difference. "You've been all flustered and stuff for a while and I was just wondering… how _much_ you like me. You're not the best at conveying your emotions, so I'm kind of unclear if you're… you're… in – love – with – me or not. If you are that's… flattering and… you should argue if you're not, you kn—" He looked up at Kanda to see his neck tilted at and awkward angle against the seat, eyes closed, face perfectly calm. He wasn't just sleeping; he was sleeping like a _log_.

A very pretty, quiet, gentle one, but still a log.

Lavi sighed at Kanda and shook his head a little at himself. He felt terrible, though he figured things could be worse. He didn't know how he felt but he knew what he wanted – that was a step, at least.

With a little flick of his ears he pushed himself up and untangled his fingers from Kanda's, wincing when he bent his neck wrong, and stretched his arms out over his head with a yawn. Even when they weren't touching, Kanda went right on looking gloriously soft in his sleep, like a dark haired angel with a permanent frown on his lips that filled Lavi with strange sensations. He denied them though, knowing it was the same sort of feeling as the urge to open the window and stick his head out in the freezing winter wind so he could smell things. And how he wanted to scratch his fingernails on the back of the seat. And how he still wanted to attack the tassel on Kanda's chest.

He shook his head before he stood up, his boots were a little louder than he thought they would be on the wooden floor. He stepped hurriedly to Allen's side of the compartment. When he had the British boy close enough he touched his shoulder, rousing him from a snore filled dream.

Allen blinked at him. "Lavi?"

"We're not there yet, scoot over."

"Wha-why?" Allen questioned even as he rolled enough to make room for another person in his seat. His hand went to his throat and gave it a slow, painful looking rub before he seemed to remember what had caused it. "Are you sane now?" He inquired a bit more loudly.

Lavi chuckled as he sat on the seat by Allen's hips but didn't lean over. "Yeah. Sorry about biting you, it was just… a defense mechanism I guess." He smiled with all of his teeth, a normal expression, and Allen returned the face with a tiny lift of his lips, relieved. Lavi reached out and ruffled his hair amiably, just because it felt like the thing to do.

Allen's smile widened to show his teeth. "It's ok. I didn't mean to hit you that hard either. Now why did you wake me up?" His hand pushed Lavi's away from his hair and the redhead sighed at it – even if it wasn't Kanda he still wanted to touch someone, the only difference was he didn't feel like ripping off Allen's clothes while he did it. He shrugged off the difference as Kanda being a friend and Allen being like his brother – Allen was a different kind of safe than Kanda was.

"Yuu-chan fell asleep."

"Ok…"

"I'm worried… I might… do something so… can I share your seat?"

"Eh?" Allen furrowed his eyebrows at the blush on Lavi's face. He hadn't even known Lavi could blush outside of looking at women.

Lavi turned his left foot against the wood of the floor as if he was shy. "Every time I look at him I… sorta want to get close and… he said he likes me but I dunno what that means really. And I don't wanna wake up in a pile of clothes, sore, and sticky, and you lookin' at us like we just ripped out your virgin eyes with forced voyeurism." With a gradualness that showed his uncertainty more than his quiet mumble, Lavi turned his face to Allen, green eye cast downward, ears turned in Kanda's direction. He seemed perfectly inexperienced and innocent in that moment, timid, confused. It was a bit unlike him to let all of that show on his face, but it was still there, the same as the little twinkle of yearning in the depth of his rouged cheeks.

"You like him?" Allen whispered with a grin.

Lavi shrugged. "I dunno. I can't tell what I like when I have sex mechanisms the same as I have defense mechanisms."

"You always have sex mechanisms."

"You're not supposed to be honest about this sort of thing, Moyashi-chan."

"The truth hurts but it's better than lying."

"Doesn't mean you should talk about my sex drive like it's some sort of—"

"Super powered monster the likes of which the world has never known?"

"Thank you. You can stop being a brat now."

Allen made a soft sound of amusement and pushed himself to sitting. He reached up and clapped Lavi across the back in a show of understanding, even if he didn't really get it completely. "You can share my seat, Lavi." He said with a small smile, rubbing his open palm against the apprentice Bookman's shoulders. "If it's really that much of a problem, I don't mind. Just… don't try to do dirty, Shishou-like things to me, ok?"

"Can I curl up with you?" Lavi blurted at once. "It's platonic, I swear. People calm me but… I curl up with you and sleep through the train ride. I curl up with Yuu-chan, I fuck him into the seat with my fingers tangled in all of the beautiful, ebony hair, smelling his soap and that musky, heady odo—"

"I get it." Allen drawled with a slightly sickened expression. "No pranks though."

"Cross my heart and hope to die if I do."

Allen sighed softly and let himself sink once more against the seat, pillowing his head on his right arm. When he was finished settling himself Lavi flopped down beside him, facing him, and bundled his arms under his head, not quite touching, but close enough to feel his heat there. Their knees bumped Allen shifted back enough for Lavi to shyly lean into his chest, ears tucked next to the white haired boy's chin, left arm over his neck. It was a tight squeeze and Lavi let out a soft purr and sighed deeply, enjoying the feel of non-threatening, non-sexual nearness. He reached out and kneaded gently at Allen's chest.

Allen giggled at him, but didn't pull back scandalized like he thought he might. "You know that cats do that when they remember nursing, right?"

"I do it when I feel warm and happy and content." Lavi muttered up at him, continuing with his touches. "I'm not turning you on, am I?" He inquired with a snicker. Allen blew in Lavi's right ear, hard, and it twitched repeatedly; Lavi shivered and a sound of discontent bubbled out of his mouth, his right hand came up and clamped on it, eyes narrowed at Allen's chin. "Meany."

"Teach you to tease me…"

"I could lick you. That might do it."

"Ew. Lavi that's like… eight hundred kinds of wrong."

"Yeah, well, we're two guys sharing a seat like a bed. Some people would say _that's_ wrong."

"Licking is an entirely different field than sharing a bed."

"Really?"

"Exchange of bodily fluids."

"Wow, Allen. That's some impressive jargon from an inexperienced fifteen year old."

Kanda blinked his eyes open at _bodily fluids_ and let his neck crack itself into an upright position, his sapphire eyes unfocused for a moment as he blinked first toward the window and then toward the floor, his head far too fuzzy for having caught maybe a half an hour nap. He never slept that hard on missions – especially in trains on missions – for fear that something would creep up on him and kill him in some stupid, pointless ambush by an enemy too weak to face him head on. He felt surprisingly groggy, enough so that when his eyes fell on a certain redhead and his neighboring inexperienced fifteen year old, he felt a strange, unfamiliar sense of anger fill his gut.

He was mildly annoyed at Lavi, for some reason, but Allen was different. He felt a sudden irrepressible urge to make the younger Exorcist cry out in agony and bleed to death slowly. His jaw clamped and his lip curled, his heart turned from a pulsing muscle to a pounding war drum filled with fire. Mugen was in his hand in a moment (not that he knew what he was doing with it) and he growled defensively (not that he knew exactly what he was defending) before he pushed himself out of his seat in Allen's general direction (not that Lavi, a seat, and half of the train was also in _Allen's _direction as well). He brandished the blade without threatening verbally for a moment, looking down at the pair _cuddling_ across from him.

Allen had his arms around Lavi. Lavi who he knew Kanda liked. Lavi who Kanda had kissed. The two of them! Cuddling and talking about fluid exchange right before his eyes.

A pair of silver eyes turned to him and the metallic eyebrows above them knitted so hard that he thought they were trying to make a new pair of socks. "Um… is something wrong Kanda?"

"Yes, Walker. Your existence is suddenly more annoying than usual."

* * *

**Garsh, if I had Kanda beside me at this moment, I'd hug him for saying that…**

**I hope you liked it. Your reviews are wonderful! I hope the kiss was to your liking. :D Now Lavi just needs to get over the cat-thing and… well… yeah…**

**TBC?**


	8. Frustration and Rationality

**And this is why the story is rated M. Well, not entirely, but it's the START of why it's rated M.**

**WARNINGS: SEXUAL ACTS. Masturbation references, VERY blushy Lavi, and an Allen who does not know what it is to have tact.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own -man. If I did… the characters I like would be hurt more. Ironically enough.**

Part Six: Frustration and Rationality

"Oh, shit."

"_Eh?"_

Kanda charged. Mugen sliced down at the pair of snuggling Exorcists, the arm that powered it fully intending to hack at least one of them in half. The sword fell swiftly, seeming to part the air like only a sharp blade could, and in the time it took to fall Kanda managed to wonder why he was doing what he was. He was angry, but where that anger came from was beyond him for a moment. His weapon sank into cushion and Lavi and Allen rolled toward him, landing in a heap at his feet, Allen on top of the larger man. A flurry of something else went through his gut as he recoiled to strike again; that new feeling was something he had a name for and it threatened to stop his attack mid stroke.

Pain. Betrayal. Hurt. Lavi hurt him. In the course of a half second he realized that that emotion and the defensive knot of protective intent were what made him mad, what caused him to want to see blood and cause pain. But he wanted to hurt what he wanted to protect somehow, and that didn't make sense to him.

Allen was waving his arms in defense and Lavi was pulling the white haired boy away, saying something that Kanda didn't hear. He kept his half-minded assault up, moving like a man in a dream, thoughts slowing him only marginally.

Why did it hurt? Was it because he liked Lavi? Had the two boys even been doing more than intimately sharing a seat?

Mugen caught Allen's left hand and the British boy made a short sound at it, dark flesh showing through the fabric of his cut glove, hard fingers curled around the katana's length. Mugen couldn't get through Crown Clown, Kanda knew, but for a fleeting moment he didn't worry so much as wonder if he could cut Allen's hand clean off and get away with it – but decided not to try. He pulled back on the handle but Allen held firm, shoulder jerking when Kanda made to yank the blade from his grasp. He growled and pulled harder.

"Che. Let go." The words seeped from his lips louder than he intended, and wetter somehow. He furrowed his brow at it without much thought and drove forward with all of his weight before he yanked it backward, wrenching his Innocence from Allen's hand with the force of his movements. He stumbled backward at the same moment that a streak of red moved at him almost too fast to follow. Lavi's hands caught his wrists and pressed him against the thin wooden sliding door while his mouth produced words that Kanda could not understand. Kanda snarled at him, and tried to push himself back into the middle of their tiny compartment.

Lavi's ears flattened against his head and he bent Kanda's right wrist to an angle he hoped would be uncomfortable enough for him to loosen the samurai's grip on Mugen and get it away. Kanda was deadly enough in a blind rage without a sharp pointy object in his hand.

"Yuu-chan!" He kept repeating, trying to guess how close he was to breaking the wrist in his hand. "Damn it, listen! I dunno what your problem is but you're wrong! We were sleeping, Yuu-chan! Well… trying to… but… But it doesn't matter! Calm the fuck down, Yuu!" Mugen spiraled away to the floor the fourth time he bashed the man's wrist against the wooden portal and Lavi let up a bit, a mistake that gave Kanda move enough to trip him backward, both of them careening toward the window. Allen scampered out of the way, but caught Kanda's right boot with his own, which sent them smashing into Kanda's old seat instead.

When Kanda landed half in the seat and half against the window, he was still thinking. Did it hurt to see Lavi near Allen because he liked him? Was that what caused all of this?

What was the word for that again? It wasn't _zealousness_, though that was the first thing that came to mind. He thought about it, ignoring Lavi's yammering mouth above him and the bite of nails on his skin.

Was it…

"_Jealousy?"_

Lavi stopped trying to convince Kanda that he needed to calm down and try and understand the situation at the word. Indeed he shut up entirely. He just stayed where he was, leaning over Kanda, and let his ears lift slowly from his skull in an expression of utter surprise. The Japanese man looked up at him – really looked – and furrowed his brow.

"Is that… why my chest hurts?" Kanda's question hit Lavi like a boulder, but he didn't seem to notice, he just kept talking in his low whisper, oblivious to Lavi's suddenly slack hands. "Is that why I don't want Moyashi to touch you? Because I want to?"

Slowly, with his ears cocked forward to catch every whisper of sound Kanda made, Lavi pushed himself away toward the door. It was not safe to be around a person with more emotional trouble than he had and, at the moment, Kanda was looking pretty emotionally troubled. It hadn't occurred to him what the samurai had meant by not being used to caring, but he understood now. Kanda had never liked anyone. Kanda had never made a move on anyone. Kanda was trying to understand what he felt and why he did what he did without knowing the psychology behind it, and Lavi had been stupid enough to just try and take it in stride.

He felt impossibly mean. Kanda was, after all, trying to change for him. Trying to feel.

_Would it be so bad to do the same thing, Lavi?_

In that second he wanted to kiss his best friend if only to show that he appreciated what he was trying to do. Instead he rocked forward on his feet and leaned down enough to throw his arms around Kanda's neck.

The Japanese man didn't understand and went as stiff as a board against the seat.

"Che. What are you—"

"Shut up." It sounded odd coming from Lavi's mouth. "Just be quiet for a minute and lemme hug you."

"Why?"

"Because I should."

"Che."

"Hug me back?" Lavi mumbled into Kanda's shoulder. The samurai was still. Then, as if showing physical affection caused him a great deal of pain, as if it might break him to do it, he lifted his arms and wound them loosely around Lavi's middle, gaining a bit of strength as time went on. A chin pressed into Lavi's hair. "Yuu-chan?"

"Hn?"

"Maybe I… well… I appreciate that you're trying to understand what it is to have feelings for someone and I'm glad that you're defensive of me." He said softly into Kanda's jacket at the same time as he resisted the urge to rub his face on it and press his hands into the slightly open collar. If those were his feelings or not he didn't care. Raping Kanda wasn't an option. Making out with Kanda was not an option. Things would get confusing as soon as he lost his ears. "But Allen and I weren't doin' anything. I'm afraid that if I stay too close to you I'll start taking off your clothes and, as nice as some Yuu-chan lovins sound, I don't wanna do anything when I don't know what's going on with my sex mechanisms. I was _just_ explaining that to Allen when you got all manly and violent." His right hand was touching shirt somehow, though he couldn't remember undoing any buttons and Kanda rarely went around with his coat open unless they were inside. The older Exorcist's breath spread warmly into his hair and he tilted his face a bit to the side, sending it in slow ripples against his ears.

_Oh shit…_

He heard the door open and his left ear jerked in question. Allen's voice was very quiet and polite, as if he weren't flustered beyond reason by the two of them.

"I'm going to check out the dining car…"

The door slid shut faster than it opened; the slam of wood to wood made the room feel just that much emptier.

Just that much more like a coffin crammed tight by two exceedingly warm bodies and all of their clothes.

Lavi shivered.

Kanda shifted and Lavi found himself pressed flush with the seat, left hand pinned, right still inside of his best friend's jacket. The shower of hair that pooled next to his face was on the wrong side to shade his eyes from the window at his feet, and he tilted his face upward to avoid the sun. Midnight blue eyes looked down at him and he realized just how intimate their position was, what with Kanda's right knee between his thighs and his hand pressed over the samurai's heart. He would have been willing to bet that Kanda could feel his body heat rising by the moment.

_Shit…shit…shit… Bad Lavi. This is not a dream you cannot just pop wood and expect it to blow over smoothly._

"You swear it?"

"Swear what, Yuu-chan?" If Kanda didn't move, Lavi was going to start undressing him. It was just what his hand wanted to do.

"That there's nothing between you and Allen."

"His genitals would have to do some magical sparkly transforming and turn into girl parts for me to be interested. And even then he'd be like my sister."

"Che. That's not a vow."

"I swear by The Powers That Be that I have no romantic relationship with Allen Walker. Satisfied?" He had two buttons undone in the middle of Kanda's shirt and his palm was just _itching _to try and touch his skin. Kanda didn't seem to care.

"Far from it." The words were a growl and Lavi's hand touched flesh. "Che. What are you doing?"

"I dunno. Feeling you up, I guess."

Kanda's eyes narrowed but there was an odd air of amusement to it, a sort of sparkle that Lavi had never seen in him. The redhead found a generous amount of stomach before he discovered the edge of Kanda's customary chest wrapping, which he slipped his fingers under experimentally. The face above him lost a hint of that humor and became more serious, glaring only as a means to keep from blushing. "Che. You're a liar. If you were really that unsure about how you feel about me, you would have tried to throw me on the floor by now."

"What logic would tell me to do doesn't make my horny body do it, Yuu-chan."

"Horny?"

"I said that out loud?"

"Heh heh heh." It was an odd sound – the unrestrained chuckle of Kanda Yuu – and Lavi found himself laying perfectly still at it, frightened at the man might find an axe to hack him to death with if he didn't. _Mad_ was the only word he could think to use for it, besides maybe _eerie._ Like something he might have heard in a haunted house once. It didn't make sense to him that someone so pretty might make such an unattractive sound; indeed it confused him so much that when he felt a tug on his scarf he lifted his neck enough to let it go sliding away to the floor.

Recognition snapped Lavi's eye open wider and he made to yank his hand away from Kanda's chest as if it burned him, but another stopped it from retreating. He bent his knees and found Kanda's face shoved unceremoniously closer, hair tickling the bridge of his nose and a mouth touching the rim of his eye patch, hot and moist by his skin. Instead of moving anymore than he had, he waited; the fingers around his palm clamped like vices.

"Yuu…"

"Let me." The request was spoken into his forehead, the vibrations of vocal cords sending little tingles of feeling down his neck, hair brushing his cheeks. His breathing was rapid and he couldn't explain why, though he figured it had something to do with his hand being free and fingers dancing down to the belt of his pants. A flurry of heat shot from his toes to his face, lingering around the base of his spine on the way up, and he shivered. His hand slipped downward and he caught the curve of a hip, smooth and hard to reach with only that tiny hole to stick his arm through.

"Let you what, Yuu-chan?" He was very warm and there was naught he could do to hide it with Kanda's neck in front of his face, feeling every movement of air in his lungs.

Wordlessly Kanda pressed his hand beneath the line of Lavi's belt, just far enough to make the younger man's mouth fall open and his shoulders hunch in voiceless protest. "Take the edge off." He whispered, and let go of the redhead's still captured wrist to pull at the buckle that he had never quite gotten undone. He was determined not to be afraid, so he wasn't. There were many moments when words would have fit between them; he paused every time Lavi seemed to want to say something, slightly unsure, and only opened the topmost two buttons before he leaned forward and laid his lips on the apprentice Bookman's. The eye that looked up at him was half between blank and desperate, and he felt both feelings reflected in himself – though he couldn't let them block out what he was doing.

When he moved his fingers once more, working into that dark, warm, fabric covered space, unable to see where he was going or what he was doing but by the expression on Lavi's face, his best friend found his voice again.

Lavi reached up with his free hand and buried his fingers in the shoulder of Kanda's coat. "Wai-wait, Yuu-chan, what if Moyashi—an' I still don't know an-an-and – _oh my God—Yuu!_" He couldn't hide the expression of sheer terror, muted by a gentle over-coloring of pleasure, when Kanda's fingers brushed the base of his embarrassing arousal. He didn't know what was worse, the fact that he was hard or the fact that he was _letting Kanda _touch him because he was hard. He felt fire burn across his cheeks and turned his face down, fought away the desire to ravage, then the desire to kill himself, and bit the end of his tongue for a moment. Goosebumps jumped up both of his arms and he whimpered more out of fear than sensation; Kanda hadn't guided him out of his pants but instead to a better angle, still covered by the thin white fabric of his boxers. "God, you must hate me."

"Shut up, and stop blushing." Kanda's tone was endearing, if gently scolding, and he leaned forward enough to kiss the corner of Lavi's mouth again as he spoke, though he wanted more than that fleeting caress. "If you touched me right now you'd know that this isn't embarrassing. _I_ want to do this with you. And you want me also. If you didn't _this_ wouldn't be hard, in my hand or otherwise."

"_Fuck_, Yuu-chan… there's so much and…" Lavi breathed, letting his head sink back against the seat cushion. There weren't really words that he could say to deny what was happening, because he _did_ want it. But there were too many questions to go with it. He needed to clear his head. "I d-do want you but—"

"Mmm…" It was a sound against his mouth and he was returning the touch, drawing Kanda in by the fabric of his jacket. He felt like he was falling apart. There was no choice anymore, no way to tell the older Exorcist how much of this he didn't know about, so he squinted his eye and made to bear through it, embarrassment and humiliation aside. There was a squeeze this time, and a thumb that _knew_ what it was doing moving against the top of his erection; a startled moan of enjoyment seeped out of his lips and he twitched. The mouth on his opened and he moved to capture it with his own unthinkingly, his tongue thirsting for something warm, a growl in his throat. When he pulled away, entirely under satisfied, he pressed his ears against his skull at not being able to hold his breath longer.

"_Shit, Yuu. _We only just kissed today… how can you – _I wanna_—_"_ The knee that was not between Kanda's legs bent and he slid himself far enough back to lean on the wall with his shoulders, a position that gave him access to Kanda's face and neck more easily. He attacked both with small kisses, the contact completely beyond his control – or so he thought. With his will compromised he aimed to make it the best he could, because details and explanations could follow afterward and it was good to be nice to Kanda, and he couldn't force his mouth to form coherent thoughts now anyway. He pulled a bit of skin on the left side of Kanda's neck between his lips and sucked on it, pressing with his teeth, sweeping with his tongue. The man above him made an uncharacteristic noise of pleasure and he broke away, Lavi's hands wandered up and down the sides of Kanda's body, one in his shirt, the other through two or three layers of cloth. He wanted more, even if he didn't.

Kanda returned the small caress of lips on his throat by teasing Lavi's up to meet his, regardless of the confusion on the redhead's face. Confusion was a natural reaction to being pinned down and forced to face his feelings, and Kanda found that he was vaguely reminded of himself two weeks prior, hating himself and not understanding why he wanted so much just to touch the redhead again. He stroked on slowly, paused, went on, and Lavi writhed deliciously against the wood by the door, a blush darkening his cheeks above his red swollen lips.

"I've wanted to kiss you for at least two weeks, Lavi. And I've imagined more since the bridge." He spoke between kisses, having remembered the redhead's unfinished question, and pumped more strongly; Lavi rolled his hips to meet him. "Did you think I didn't come to see you because I hated you? Fucking retard. I didn't come to see you because _this_ didn't make sense to me then. Idiot."

"D-don't _say_ mean things when you have y-your hand on my… er… co-pe-ere—"

"Che. I could talk about something else. You hang a little to the left, don't you?"

The blush on Lavi's face renewed itself tenfold, his ears twitched down toward his face as if in an effort to hide it. "You know what? Just…don't talk." He growled and thumped his head back on the wall. Kanda took the movement as an invitation to return the little bruise Lavi had left on his neck and leaned down to bite it, a low hum in the back of his throat. For an inexperienced kisser Kanda was multitasking fine; Lavi doubted he'd be able to cover all of the hickeys on his neck at this rate, especially the one keeping Kanda quiet now, and yet the hand that fondled his erection moved from tip to base and back again the same as his own would undistracted – only better. He moaned softly at the thought.

_This isn't like what happens in the shower._ His mind chimed, and whished for the life of him that his skin would just burn off of his face from all of the flushing and heat running through him.

He whined upward and found himself falling into a wet kiss, one that included tongue, to his secret horror and enjoyment. His right hand yanked Kanda's hip forward – now covered in a thin layer of perspiration that he hadn't remembered being there – and pressed up a little with his thigh. He felt hard heat on his leg and shivered. Kanda broke the kiss with a strangled choke of surprise but didn't stop with his hand, moving suddenly stronger. The samurai felt closer than Lavi was and he hadn't even touched himself yet.

"Yuu, should I…"

Kanda nibbled along the left side of Lavi's neck and across his collar bone. The redhead's hands were shaking.

"Should you what?"

Lavi made a loud mewing sound at the touch of teeth on his Adam's apple. He was too hot, wearing too much clothing. He'd start with fixing that and then he'd see if he could use some feline courage to make himself return the favor, because he knew it should be returned. For some reason he couldn't currently grasp he disliked the idea of this being one sided – that was how he had gotten himself into this situation in the first place, really, what with Kanda changing for him and him not changing for Kanda. With fingers that trembled the moment they left Kanda's body, he wrenched open the buttons of his jacket and slipped out of it, then hooked his left arm around the back of Kanda's neck, burying his hand in all of that silky hair, then reached out to run his free palm down the uncomfortable looking bulge in the smaller man's pants.

"Take _your_ edge off?" Lavi finally managed, despite the little hiss that came from Kanda's lips.

The Japanese man paused, then shook his head after a moment, swallowing thickly. "No. You don't know if you want to." He answered at length, and resumed the reddening of Lavi's facial features. "But you can make it up to me," He husked, and leaned forward enough to breathe half of the words into the redhead's ear; he felt the hand on the back of his neck curl suddenly, "By letting this happen again. It's not the same as it would be if you knew what you felt, but I want to make you feel good." He reached out with his teeth and brought the furry tip of one of Lavi's ears between his teeth and actually _felt_ Lavi's reaction against his palm. His mouth pressed into a thin lipped smile.

"I'm – pretty sure – I wanna do this, Yuu." Lavi panted softly. "I wanna push you away and… fuck you into the seat, but I wanna run away and have a blush induced stroke, too. So… compromise?"

"Che. Not until you're normal."

"That's not fair."

"Life leads to suffering. I expect it."

"Yuu-chan, you're being ridiculous."

"No, you are. I want to do this so I am. You don't know what you want to do to me, so I don't want you to do anything."

Lavi frowned but couldn't see a way to argue. He just watched as Kanda lifted his left hand and slipped it in next to his right, and yanked savagely on the Japanese man's hair when it began to work in tandem with the first. The urge to have naked flesh against his own was so strong that he found himself pulling at the buttons of Kanda's shirt without knowing how his hand got close enough to them to do it. Eventually the fabric hung open beneath his jacket, tempting and more than half bare in the interrupted sunlight. They were passing a stand of trees, the flitting lights seeming to match the pounding of Lavi's heart.

Kanda wished for a moment that he could see what he was doing with his hands but shrugged it off as a whim when he felt a dancing touch on the material of his chest wrapping. He gave a little squeeze with his left hand and the touch slid to his waist, clamping.

"_Fuck…"_ Lavi's hips gave a sudden jerk. "Yuu, I'm gonna…"

"_Aa."_ Lavi didn't need to speak Japanese to know that was an affirmative. Panic shot through him when Kanda fumbled backward enough to lower his face toward the opening in his pants, seeming determined despite the hands that suddenly caught on the front of his jacket.

"What are you doing?"

Kanda made a dissatisfied expression when he looked up at Lavi. "You got a better place to put your mess? _Baka_."

Lavi stammered. "Wai-wait! I mean… it's a great gesture and _fucking hot_, but I'm sure we can get a…uh… a napkin or something if you get it on your ha—_Yuu-chan! _You're breathing on – that's my – I'm gonna…" He looked down at Kanda to see him looking up with his bruised lips slightly parted, eyes locked on his face even as his fingers pulled at the material of Lavi's boxers enough to bring his hardened flesh into sight. Every protest the redhead had turned into a loud moan of wanton need and his pelvis lifted in invitation despite his hesitance. Without looking away from his face Kanda closed his lips over the aching flesh that Lavi offered.

It only lasted a moment, a few seconds more of stroking and squeezing and an experimental brush of tongue, Lavi's hands moving from cloth to hair – and then it was over. The redhead wanted to shut his left eye and ride out the wave of pleasure that shook him from his booted toes to the very tip of his ears, but Kanda's gaze held his locked in place. His best friend, bent over on a train seat with the tip of his cock in his mouth, eyes slightly widened, cheeks gently flushed, hair sticking lightly to the sides of his face in sweat that had been half his making. He was beautiful, exotic, something that Lavi had never looked at with quite that sort of point of view before, something frighteningly passionate. The warm tight feeling in Lavi's stomach seemed to constrict twice at the sight of him, and the slight tug by Kanda's left hand pulled a strangled caterwaul from his throat.

He watched the dark haired man swallow, a tiny string of white dripping from the right side of his mouth. Lavi cursed in a low, shivering whisper. His shirt was sticking to his chest with sweat and his whole body felt oddly hot and tingly, after shocks twitching up his spine and down his arms. He repeated the curse softly, having no other sound or word to describe what his mind and his body were doing to him.

Kanda let the redhead's now softening phallus slip from his lips and tucked it away without looking, keeping his eyes on Lavi's suddenly distant expression. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and licked off the small amount of fluid that he had missed, just because there was nothing else to do with it, scowling. As soon as his tongue was back in his mouth Lavi made a tiny growl at him and disentangled his fingers from the tresses of his hair only to press his palms to his swiftly overheating face.

"Che. That tasted disgusting." He said in an effort to soothe the redhead who seemed to be headed swiftly toward mental collapse.

Lavi made a tiny sound of embarrassment and fear, then threw both of his arms entirely over his head, blocking out his face with his sleeves. He made a number of hurried, nonsense noises when he felt fingers on his pants again, but they were doing them up when he ventured to look, Kanda's eyes on his hands. Lavi wet his lips and opened his mouth to protest, but no sound came out.

His belt slipped back into place and Kanda started buttoning his own shirt.

"_Fuck…_" It was out of Lavi's mouth again before he could stop it. The samurai looked at him and raised an eyebrow, hands paused on his shirt.

"What?"

Lavi floundered for words for a moment before they came tumbling out of his mouth all at once. "You just… just gave me a _hand job_ and I'm sittin' here, thinking about how _hot_ it was, and how I wanna return the favor, but I've got no _freakin'_ clue if that's me thinking it or if my ears have gone to my head. And you're looking at me like you just did something completely _normal_ and there isn't a thing in your mind that wasn't there yesterday, and it's –_ nya –_ I'm gonna die if you keep starin' at me like I look like a plate of soba. Or I'll rip off your clothes and pin _you_ down to the seat and suck your – _Gods_ I'm gonna die if I think about—Yuu why are you leaning—" Lavi's lips were sealed with a delicate, closed kiss, a kiss that screamed affection and hunger regardless of it's seeming innocence. He wasn't even breathing when Kanda pulled away and touched the side of his face with a steady, cool hand.

"You just meowed at me, Cat-boy; I'd stop talking before someone comes in to find out who's touching a cat in unsightly places."

"I… meowed?"

"You said _nya_."

"Shit… but that's not important, Yuu-chan! What the Hell am I supposed to do about… us?!"

Kanda looked at the redhead from the corner of his eye as he finished with his shirt and moved on to his jacket, he noted that he'd have to brush his hair and tie it back what with how the back was knotted from Lavi's hands. "Wait." He said stiffly. "Don't do anything until you know what you want."

"But that logic doesn't work! If you don't think we should do anything until I understand what's going on with my head and my body, how could you have… done what you just did?"

Kanda smirked at his collar as he tucked the last button in place and started raking his fingers through his hair to get out the snags. "Che. I never said I couldn't do things. I know what I want."

"Yuu…" Lavi pushed himself a little higher and Kanda looped his hair through his bracelet, temporarily fixing the problem of having it hang all the way down his shoulders in the way of everything. He turned to Lavi then, still without his coat, eye wide, and smiled that expression that should have split his face right down the middle.

"Make sense to you?"

"No." Lavi reached out and took a firm hold of Kanda's shoulder before pulling him down into an embrace that Kanda did not return, once again as stiff as a piece of wood in his arms. "You're Yuu-chan. You don't like people or touch people or do things for them but you… you just did _that_ for me and you don't want anything back for it? You were just as hard as I was, I felt it. Why the hell would you say no to me? You still are, for all I know."

"Why the fuck do you care?" Kanda hissed and Lavi jerked back at the words, stared at Kanda with confusion burning bright in his eye. "You don't get it. I didn't do that for you, I did it for me. I did it because I wanted to, because making you blush and pant at me makes _me_ feel… fuzzy. And warm. And I like the feeling. Seeing you with that satisfied expression on your face is good to me. I get what I want; I don't need you to do anything but let me." Kanda placed a hand in the middle of Lavi's chest and held him in place while he stood up.

Lavi pushed himself to sitting when Kanda moved away, and watched him retrieve his fallen sword, running his fingers along the blade before he sheathed it at his hip. Lavi pulled his lower lip between his teeth and the Japanese man turned back to him, glaring. "Yuu-chan."

"What?" Perfectly biting. Normal. Crisp. He didn't even look flustered.

"I'm really, really, really sorry."

"Che." Kanda rolled his eyes and turned back to the door, sliding it open with his left hand and kicking in the toes of his boots. They were too close to town for him to be going to the dining car – which was too expensive and frilly for his blood anyway – but he was still leaving. Lavi didn't question his intentions. They needed to be apart before the redhead dug himself a hole with no way out. "At least you can know that you feel that, ne. _Baka Koneko._" Kanda stepped through the doorway and slid the door shut behind him, but Lavi heard no footfalls that would signify him moving angrily down the car with a glare.

"Yuu-chan…"

-- -- --

Allen was wandering down the middle of the train, picking spinach from between his teeth when he saw Kanda disappear into the bathroom with the deepest, most world-hating scowl on his face that the boy had ever seen. He picked up his pace a little at it, worried that the samurai might have killed Lavi in a fit of sexual frustration, and stumbled when the train came to a shrieking halt on the tracks. Not their stop, he remembered, there were two beforehand.

He made his way through the suddenly congested walkway apologizing to every other person he bumped into, until he came at last to the compartment the three of them had claimed as their own and knocked lightly on the door. He didn't hear anything – not with the hustle of people wandering passed him – so he counted slowly to five before he opened it. Even if Kanda wasn't in there, it was better to be safe than blinded.

Lavi was stretched out full length on the seat that Kanda had been in, on the left side of the compartment looking in from the door, laying on his rumpled coat, left arm draped over his face. His right leg hung lazily to the floor, left bent up beside him, and Allen couldn't help but think of him as a lazy cat enjoying the full feeling after a fresh meal, accept his ears were decidedly downcast. Allen sniffed.

"It smells like sex in here."

Lavi made a long sound that might have been a catlike sob and covered his face with his palms. Allen stepped inside slowly and shut the door behind him. "We didn't have sex, Allen. And I am a stupid, stupid asshole. Please kill me." Lavi grumbled as Allen moved to stand beside him, walking awkwardly after growing used to the train moving so much. He looked down at the redhead when he came close enough and frowned deeply at him, eyebrows pressed together thoughtfully. After a moment an eye looked up at him from behind those long, thin fingers and Lavi's ears turned out to the sides as if searching for something.

"What happened?" Allen asked, and reached out to stroke soothingly in the middle of those furry feline features.

The apprentice Bookman felt the difference in himself at once. He was calmer with that hand on his head, his heartbeat slower, his breath more even. He sighed at it and sagged against the wall. "A lot. Did you see Yuu-chan?"

"Mmhmm. He went in the bathroom."

"Will you check on him for me?"

"Why?"

Lavi colored lightly, but his cheeks didn't start burning. "I'm worried he… might be putting up a tough front and need someone to tell him that they understand. I can't do that right now because I'm the cause of his problems – if he has any – so… will you… just check on him?" Lavi sighed and reached out to wrap his arms around Allen middle and yank him into a spontaneous, entirely safe embrace, his face pressed against the boy's chest. Allen made a short sound of amusement and kept brushing his fingers through Lavi's sweaty hair, never quite touching the awkward places behind his ears. "After I hug you for being so Goddamn nice and understanding and leaving the room when things got awkward, I mean. And knowing how to pet me like that without making me… you know…" He breathed in a let out a long, humming sigh.

Why couldn't Kanda be more like Allen? He could hug Allen and Allen could play with his ears and everyone was happy. It was a kind of trade. Give and take. Balance. There was none of that if Kanda didn't let him return his affections, even if he didn't know if he felt them.

The British boy slowed his hands and gently hugged him back. "You're very welcome, Lavi. I just hope that everything works out for you guys. And you _really_ smell like you had sex in here. You should open the window."

"How do you even know what sex smells like? Aren't you twelve?"

Allen chuckled, though there was something dark and irritated about it. "Almost sixteen. And I _did_ spend a long time with Shishou. He…" He paused as if looking for words and shifted on his feet. "Smelled like it a lot." He finished, and sighed a little at the memory. His hands came out of Lavi's hair and the apprentice Bookman felt suddenly sad for bringing up a still slightly painful memory for the younger boy – because it was painful, no matter if Allen said it wasn't. He pushed himself close enough to cover his left eye with the British teen's torso and run both of his hands up his back in unvoiced apology.

"Going to tell me _why_ it smells like that, Lavi?"

He could hear Allen's heartbeat if he listened closely enough, slow and steady and calm. "If you want to know what happened… we… he… keep this a secret, 'kay?"

"Of course."

Lavi sighed. "He… _gah_, I feel like I'm corrupting the innocent here…" He curled his fingers a little in Allen's coat and went on. "Yuu-chan noticed that I got… hot and bothered hugging him and sorta… took it upon himself to fix it. He was pretty determined and… he wouldn't let me – you know – fix it when _he_ got hot and bothered from fixing _my_ problem. Long story short that man is good with his hands." He paused, realizing just how awkward this all had to be for Allen, and gave his back a tiny little rub of reassurance. Allen didn't seem to need it when he returned the touch at the back of Lavi's neck. "So… I just wanna make sure he's not feeling the angst because of unrequited… stuff, ok? Will you check on him still?" He looked up at Allen then, rumpling his jacket front under his chin, and tried to smile.

"You have a pretty serious hickey that you might want to cover before we get to where we're going." The boy commented with a smile. "And I will check on Kanda." He decided with a tiny sigh. He carded his fingers through Lavi's hair again and a low purr started in the redhead's throat, his muscles relaxed, and his eye became hooded almost sleepily, the right side of his mouth pulled up in an expression of deep enjoyment. Allen smirked at him and the loosening quality to the hold on his back.

"Thanks, Allen." Lavi mumbled, rubbing his face against Allen's jacket. "You're _warm…_"

Allen made a tiny sound like a laugh and plopped his left hand rather hard on the top of Lavi's head. "But you have to stop hugging me so I can do it."

"Haha. Right."

**Uwa! I hope that wasn't too speedy quick for anyone. D:**

**You like?**


	9. Reciprocation and Discernment

**OMG THE THINGS THAT CHILDREN SHOULD NOT READ.**

**I own nothing. I don't even have a bed.**

**:-\**

**--  
**

Part Eight: Reciprocation and Discernment

The bathroom was cold. It was also, mercifully, built so that only a single person could occupy it at any given time; one toilet, a short sink, a mirror that looked like it had seen better days, and a graciously cracked window, all crammed into less than one square meter of space. Kanda was just thankful that the lock worked. The door wasn't very thick but it swung instead of slid, which guaranteed that the rusty old deadbolt would do more than just squeak when someone tried to get in. That assuaged his fears of discovery somewhat. He still made himself wait, standing on the too-worn rug someone had thrown in front of the waterless latrine until he was calm enough to just lean on the doorframe and think about what he had done to Lavi.

It had felt so right. And good. And a hundred thousand other words he didn't usually give pause to. He hadn't given a damn that the redhead was male, nor that his ears were furry, nor that the apprentice Bookman had seemed more virginal than even Allen might have in the same situation. Innocent. A tempting little creature, all wrapped in wit and feelings, blushing so his face almost matched his hair, trembling, frightened and trusting and teetering on the edge of violence. Kanda had done that to him – or at least the latter half – and thinking about it made his tongue run out and sweep his lower lip in memory, a clicking grunt in the back of his throat. He shivered.

He never did this unless he was alone and there was no chance – no chance in Hell – that someone would find him. He liked to pretend that he just didn't do it at all when people were stupid enough to ask, because somehow it struck him as too ironic that a supposed priest would do anything of the sort when there were no eyes to see.

Not that he'd taken any vows or pledged his loyalty to the Pope and his beliefs, anyway.

He didn't even feel guilty when his right hand slipped under his jacket to run up the buttons of his pants.

He closed his eyes and tried to pretend that the shuttering breath that filled the room wasn't his. It didn't work. He knew it was his. He knew it was his because of how his pelvis moved without meaning to at that subtle touch, every nerve singing with wakefulness. Never, not since he could remember joining the Order, had he made quite a compromised sound as the one that vibrated passed his lips when he started to undo his pants with just three fingers. The realization that he had made it caused his face feel hot despite his seclusion. All of that courage and bravado he had shown Lavi was gone now – it was just him and his memories and an astoundingly bothersome feeling of need; there was no purpose in pretenses, so there were none. Alone with only what light could fight its way behind his eyelids, he could be however vulnerable he wanted to be.

His mind was creative at times like these, when he had a specific instance that he wished to recall and relive with a subtle, more satisfying twist. There was no trying to imagine Lavi returning the favor, it just happened for him. In a sort of inward flash the bathroom was no longer there; it was just him and Lavi in a very close space, fingertips trailing curiously into his undergarments while he did the same all over again, watching through his blinded gaze as the younger man smiled coyly and leaned near enough to breathe hot air across the tiny hairs on his neck. He wondered what it would feel like to have the redhead's mouth other places besides his neck, and if it felt as good as it had looked to have it in that one, very important place.

He tilted his head back, wound his shaking fingers tightly around himself, and braced his left elbow against the corner of the counter sink where it met with the wall, skull pressed back against the wood of the door.

A knock made his fingers twitch unexpectedly and his knees buckled; a cry half of pain and half of something else entirely catching in his throat with a half-formed word that might have been – maybe – something like _what_ or _fuck_.

"Um…" He knew that voice and he _hated_ knowing it. There were maybe fifteen voices he had memorized well enough to tell whose they were through four centimeters of cheap plywood, and one of them had to be that damned Moyashi's raspy tenor. He hadn't meant to memorize it, but the kid talked so much it was hard _not_ to. "Are you still in there Kanda? I saw you go in and Lavi was worried—"

"Che." He breathed out loudly, leaning more heavily on the door. "Be out in minute."

"It's been ten already."

"Thanks for counting. Go. Away."

"Are you…ok?"

"_Fine."_

"Look, if there's something you need to talk about—"

"I don't _fucking_ need to talk about it! I need to—" The words in his head bled together into a twisted idea where he somehow managed to satisfy the aching muscle in his hand and beat Allen to death at the same time, but that didn't seem to be the response the situation warranted, so he fell silent. What did he need to do in this place to get some kind of relief?

Allen managed to sigh exasperatedly enough for Kanda to actually hear it. "You sound kind of winded though. Are you _sure _that you're ok?"

_No!_ His mind snapped. _I'm not ok! You're fucking me over with your Goddamn unnecessary concern you brainless excuse for an Exorcist! _But saying that _that_, and at the volume with which his mind produced it, was the best idea to be thrown off of the train for being obnoxious and vulgar. He forced himself to breathe, picking a better line of persuasion. "Leave me alone…" That wasn't going to get him much, he knew, so he had to do something kind and uncalled for to convey just how badly he needed solitude. "Please…" He squinted his eyes shut and forced his mouth to move no matter how much he didn't want it to, _"Allen."_

There was a sort of catch in the air at the boy's name and he knew he had done it. The silver haired teen would just walk away indifferently and he would be left to finish what was left of his task in peaceful silence.

A fist hit the door he was leaning on, hard, and it bounced into the back of his head. "Now I _know_ there's something wrong with you! Look Kanda, I know that stuff happened between you two but I think you're going about this the wrong way." Allen was oozing caring like a badly infected wound oozed pus and Kanda almost retched at it. With the way things were going it would have all been pointless – but that he had shown Lavi what he wanted. He felt fire churning in his gut. "If you really like him that much you should let him touch you back. Give and take. He didn't give me too many details but I don't want you to sit in there alone, feeling bad because he doesn't—" Kanda stopped listening and tucked his now deplorably flaccid self back into his undergarments and hiked up his pants to button them and buckle his belt. He tugged down his jacket, scowled at himself in the mirror, and threw open the door.

"Because that's what friends – and lovers—" Allen stopped the moment Kanda took him by the throat and slammed him into the opposing wall, feet dangling from the height of the samurai's calves. His left hand closed at once on the wrist of the hand that held him, eyes rolling with a kind of panic that only came from knowing that death was a possibility in the near future, and kicked his feet at Kanda. The Japanese man took note of the fact that the boy couldn't breathe and moved his hand a little – just enough allow the passage of air. There was a started gasp of his name that was nearly unrecognizable and he sneered at it.

"Shut _up_, Moyashi." He growled, and gave a little shake with his arm. Allen was heavier than he looked. "Why couldn't you just _leave_ me _alone_?" He demanded in a voice not so much a whisper as a restrained hiss of a yell. The British Exorcist bit his lip and pushed his eyebrows together.

"You're hurting me."

Kanda dropped him. He couldn't explain _why_ he did it – he would have snickered at the futile words in the past, but it somehow fit to just let the boy go. He wasn't going to stop blaming him for his idiocy, but he wasn't going to beat him to death either, no matter how much he wanted to. Having been interrupted seemed to take the bite out of his temper somehow; he didn't have the drive to do what he wanted to by means of violence, it took too much effort. "Just… leave me alone when I tell you to." He grumbled, and hit (swatted, slapped, patted in a slightly too violently manner to be friendly) the surface of Allen's heaving back in something of a pseudo-apology. Allen looked up at him with his gasping mouth open and blinked as if he had seen an astoundingly bright light, dazed and in pain and speechless.

"You aren't," He coughed and rubbed his now twice abused throat. "Going to try and off me?"

The samurai let himself smirk. "I wouldn't try. I'd just do it."

Allen managed somehow to look breathless and miffed at the same time.

Kanda didn't so much as wait for Allen to recover as he occupied the same space in the hall as him while he found his breath, a fact that Allen made a mental note of. The Japanese man didn't look at him, just crossed his arms and leaned on the bathroom door with a slightly harder glare than normal, the straight line of his bangs shading his downturned eyes, feet even and balanced so both of his shoulders were flush with the wall. He seemed uncomfortable, standoffish, like the pretty girl at a party who didn't know the steps to the dance and was too ashamed to admit it to anyone who asked her to join them. Allen smiled at the thought a little. Somehow, Kanda being a shy girl was like some bizarre sort of divine revenge in his mind, not to mention laughable considering the state he had left Lavi in.

"Che. Are you going to keep staring at me or go back to the compartment?"

"Do you care what I do?"

Kanda sort of changed the weight on his feet without being obvious about it and kept his eyes averted. "I won't go back there alone." He confessed it as if it was something to be proud of.

"You could… go back in the bathroom if you want…" Allen suggested offhandedly, he didn't expect the look of round-eyed surprise that Kanda gave him anymore than he had expected the man to lift his upper lip in an undignified expression of amusement. Now that Kanda made those face – smiles, he figured – he kind of wished that he wouldn't. He was prettier (and therefore more feminine) with his face in its relaxed state, not smiling or glaring at all. He cleared his throat. "What?"

The older Exorcist shrugged his right shoulder, repressed hilarity still dancing in his eyes. "You killed the mood, Moyashi."

Allen's expression was suddenly very confused. His first erroneous thought was that Kanda had to be in a specific kind of mental state to put down his guard enough to relieve himself in a public restroom, but he dismissed the idea at once. He couldn't imagine for a very, very long moment what there was to do in a bathroom besides what the bathroom had been designed for, and what would require some sort of personal setting or mood lighting in order to work was beyond him. And then it occurred to him – just as the train lurched away from the station – what he could have interrupted.

The blood drained from Allen's face in order to rush back to it all at once.

He felt his heart fall into his stomach and his tongue tried to migrate down his throat, fear and regret twisting through him. "Oh! Kanda! I didn't… mean to… I mean… I didn't even _know_… and… _oh_… you really _are_ a guy, aren't you?" He blurted so suddenly he immediately bowed his head in horror, squinting his eyes shut for the blow he knew was going to come any moment. He deserved it this time, so he didn't bother blocking. "I always knew you were but I never imagined that you had human needs because you're so hard – I mean stoic – all the time!" He finished in a rush. He stayed with his head down, eyes shut, and continued to pray to the heavens above that Kanda killed him swiftly.

The samurai was about to do just that when the train's whistle sounded and a howl too loud and too catlike to be anyone but Lavi flooded down the middle of the train. He stopped with his hand raised in a fist and looked down the train car with an angry scowl. On pounding feet that seemed to run despite his desire to do otherwise, he moved away from Allen, who continued to cower for a short moment before he saw Kanda running away in Lavi's direction, hair slipping in its makeshift ponytail as he went. The British boy recalled how helpless the redhead had been the first time the sound had deafened him and suddenly understood Kanda's urgency – or at least half of it – and started down the hall as well, moving at a much more normal speed than his long haired companion.

Kanda threw open the compartment door a little more violently than necessary, taking in the scene all at once. The seat, which would always hold a special place in the hollow left side of his chest, was bare but for the rumpled mess of Lavi's jacket, abandoned in an obvious fit of fear and pain. The redhead himself huddled under the seat, both hands pressed to his ears even as the sound faded, eye screwed shut and teary. Without further thought about the repercussions of being so close so soon, Kanda threw himself onto the wooden floor beside the apprentice Bookman, reaching for him, wanting him safe, wanting him to stop making that horrible expression. Lavi leaned into him without seeming to understanding what or who he was, just glad of something warm to smash his face into.

Lavi smashed the left side of his face on Kanda's chest and hooked an arm around the samurai's waist, drawing him closer. He breathed deeply, but didn't open his eye to the soft touch of hands on the sides of his neck.

"Why do trains have to be so _loud_?"

"Che. So idiots like you will get out of the way of them."

Allen saw Lavi bury his fingers in the back of Kanda's coat and drag himself between the Japanese man's parted knees, pressing them closer, hiding. Kanda did the one thing that Allen would assume right off he wouldn't – he leaned down closer, forming a sort of protective shell around the redhead with his body. He didn't hear what the dark haired man was saying but he did see Lavi move as if he were laughing, which seemed odd with it being the two of them. He moved forward slowly out of curiosity, trying not to interrupt.

"I _told_ you he was twelve. A normal fifteen year old would have figured out what guys do in the bathroom when they obviously do not need to use the facilities." Lavi said very softly, tangling his fingers in the dangling tips of Kanda's hair.

The samurai might have made a sound of amusement. "Che. It took him nearly ten minutes to even think of it."

"And then what?"

"And then he told me he had thought I was a girl."

Lavi laughed and snorted at once, his hand now moving in a slow, even pattern in Kanda's hair. He pushed himself up but didn't move away from the older Exorcist, he just tilted at a slightly better angle, as if the two of them were cuddling on the floor. "I can testify to how untrue that is if you need me to." He smiled too widely and Kanda hit him roughly on the top of his head with an open fist.

"Shut up and get off of me."

"But it was just getting less awkward!" Lavi's voice was too happy.

"Awkward is being mistaken for a woman six times in two years. We have never been awkward."

"What are we then? Freaky?"

"Che. Gawk."

"I think you mean gauche."

"Hn."

"Which _means_ awkward."

"Would you fucking get off of me?!"

"I'd much rather get _you_ _off_."

"I told you no."

"Don't be obstinate."

"I said no. You touch me and it becomes harassment."

Lavi rolled his eyes. "You know what I think?"

Kanda continued to glare at the redhead as far as Allen could see, but it was hard to tell with him facing the wrong way. "Che. I don't give a damn what you think."

The redhead flattened his ears and launched himself at the dark haired man, using the hand he already had fisted in the back of Kanda's coat to keep his smaller frame from retreating. Allen watched as the Japanese man's shoulders hit the far seat – his seat – the same as Lavi's mouth hit his lips; hard and bruising. The apprentice Bookman placed his free hand on the back of the samurai's head and buried his fingers to the third knuckle in hair, obviously oblivious to the wide quality to his best friend's eyes as he kissed him. Kanda's gaze, being his face was turned a bit more toward the door now, fell on Allen and grew suddenly terrified.

He opened his mouth as if to gasp and Lavi took it as an invitation, slipping it tongue between his lips gently but hurriedly, everything he thought he felt in the touch. After a short second of continuing to stare at Allen, Kanda let his eyes slowly fall shut and returned the movement of Lavi's mouth against his. His hands wandered one to the side of Lavi's face and the other to his hair, caressing rather than pushing the younger man away. The redhead moaned a little as he pulled away to breathe and bent his head downward, pressing his forehead into the shoulder of Kanda's jacket to avoid doing it again. He heard the ragged quality to his airflow echoed in his best friend's breathing and felt the man thump his head back on the seat with a growl – warring with something internally. Lavi shivered a little, aware that a great deal of him wanted to do the exact same thing again, only naked.

"This is _bad_ Yuu-chan… I just… I _know_ I wanted that but now…" He looked up and found himself focusing on Kanda's chin, being his eyes were so avidly averted as to find something interesting in the roof above them. Lavi made a strange sound halfway between a meow and a groan and pressed his face into the side of the samurai's neck. "Why are you so _hot _all of a sudden?" Lavi whined loudly. "For a minute you were just _Yuu_ but now that I've kissed you're like… Yuu plus super erotic waves. Yuu 3000. Yuu the indescribable sex god. Yuu the—"

"Get the _fuck_ off of me. _Now._" Kanda seethed from behind his teeth, eyes squeezed tightly shut.

Lavi flinched at his anger but didn't move away, his ears sagging against his hair as his face fell into a pout. "Why, Yuu-chan? Why can't I just…" Lavi started to lean in enough to press his lips to the side of Kanda's neck and thought better of it; he simply embraced the man instead. Kanda didn't return the gesture. _"Fuck_… I'm sorry. If you don't push me off right now I'll end up exactly how I was before you decided your hand could go into my pants without burning off." He warned, face turned up enough for him to nibble lightly on Kanda's throat. The samurai made a loud sound of negation and suddenly, faster than Lavi could follow, _moved_.

The older Exorcist took a firm hold of Lavi's face and turned it toward the compartment door, which Allen was sliding closed even as the redhead's eye found his smile to focus on. Allen mumbled something about feeling woozy and then he was gone, most likely to tear his eyes from his skull in horror. Lavi sighed at it, every muscle in his body seeming to sag with depression at the sight of the boy running from his display of affection.

Unknown to the other two, Allen simply slid the door shut and leaned against it, intending to hear anything that transpired between them. Lenalee had told him not to interfere, but she had not told him not to take note and understand. He wasn't disgusted, but nothing would happen with him occupying their space, so would simply remove himself and let them have at it – and listen, if that wasn't kinky.

Kanda let Lavi gingerly fall against his chest. The redhead didn't try to kiss him anymore, he just sat there, his lower body slightly to this side, the rest pressed flush with Kanda's torso. The samurai could feel how much he wanted to be closer as well as how horrified he was to try, warmth spreading across his chest with every touch of Lavi's shirt against his coat. He wanted so much just to run his hands down the redhead's back, feel his spine, touch the parts of his body that were less intimate but carried the same level of trust as what he had already experienced. It made him nervous and hopeful to think about it. He ran his lower lip between his teeth and sighed quietly, hearing a tiny clicking sound in the back of Lavi's throat.

"Che. What?" He groaned faintly.

"Nothin'." Lavi mumbled into the seat behind him. "'Cept that I told Allen a little about us, so I don't think he's scarred beyond healing. And if you let me stay here I won't rape you, but I might start purring." His warning made Kanda pull his head up and crack his neck loudly, not even a grunt of pain escaping his throat despite the fact that Lavi winced at it. Somehow the Japanese man reminded Lavi of a very old man when he did things like that – an old crotchety man with better ways to spend his time than with cuddling. He knew he was about to be cast into the opposing seat and glared at.

"Get up, if you're going to be this close then be this close in a seat, damn it." Kanda produced the words rather gently despite the fact that he was growling, annoyed, and next to Lavi. When the redhead pulled back with his ears pointed straight up in alarm he pushed him backward at the same time that he lifted himself up enough to slide back on the seat, which left Lavi looking up at the dark haired Exorcist with one round, expectant eye. Kanda cocked an eyebrow at him. "What?" He asked with a tightening of his features.

With a slow, shaky breath Lavi moved up beside him, his back to the window as he slipped himself once again against the samurai's body, his legs curled up beneath him. The apprentice Bookman felt a rush of something under his skin the moment they touched, warm, though not a blush no matter how he felt like it might be. In the back of his throat something moved, a part of him that he hadn't really felt before, and then he _did_ purr, and doing it sent a vibration all the way down into his chest bone and through his ribcage. He felt Kanda stiffen and looked up at him apologetically, not really knowing what he was expected to do besides be there. The sound was relatively quiet, but the older man's expression still spoke volumes of uncertainty.

Kanda nervously lifted a hand to touch the side of Lavi's face, his fingers oddly cold now that he wasn't making Lavi see what he wanted. He cleared his throat at the way the redhead tilted his face into the touch.

"Che. How long until you actually turn into a werecat, _Baka Koneko_?"

Lavi stopped the sound in his throat and opened his eye, unaware that it had even fallen shut. "I dunno… this is the thirteenth day since I was bitten and that was a full moon so… I guess sixteen days, if it goes by the lunar phases." He settled his head against Kanda's painfully tense shoulder and closed his eye, ignoring a sudden desire to lick the side of the man's face. Just a moment before he would have fallen asleep without a hitch and before that he had wanted nothing more than to divest the samurai for his own pleasure, and now the cycle was continuing, another wave of lust breaking over him. He couldn't help but lean closer. "Why?" His voice was a husky whisper.

The Japanese man shifted and screwed his courage again before he turned to Lavi's throat and whispered to it. "Because I intend to fuck you before that happens incase we can't change you back."

"_What?!"_ Lavi shrieked and threw himself toward the far wall just as the train came to a screaming near-halt on the rails, the sound of his contact with the opposite side of the compartment drowning out Allen's squeak of horror from the other side of the door. He floundered for a moment, struggling to breathe, and looked back at Kanda with his ears pressed back against his head. "You cannot be serious! You kissed me, fondled my junk, and now you're telling me you wanna – wanna – gonna—" He suddenly imagined that very thing and turned a color that was just a shade lighter than his hair. The thought of Yuu naked and himself naked, together, touching, doing what they had before only different, sent a searing bolt of excitement through him that he wanted nothing more than to ignore. He couldn't though, not with Kanda looking at him like serious incarnate.

Lavi could, however, imagine all of Kanda hoisted above him, or pressed below him, sweat slicked and panting, his hands gliding over subtly golden skin.

He cleared his throat. "Yuu-chan… you're not… pullin' my leg, are you?"

"Che. If I was pulling your leg you would feel it."

"No, it's a figure of speech. I meant you're not—"

"I know what it means, idiot. How long do you think I've spoken English for?"

"You mistook _gawk_ for _gauche_."

"You were laying on me."

"So?"

"So I was distracted."

"But you still just said I would feel it if you were pulling my leg."

"I meant notice, smartass. _Figure of speech_."

"So you're _not_ kidding?"

"I do not kid."

"Yuu-chan, I'm a little frightened that you might not be kidding."

Kanda looked away from Lavi, choosing instead to look out the window at the town they were stopped in. "Che." He intoned softly, drawing his hand up to run it through his mused bangs, then pull the bracelet from his hair. He slipped it back over his wrist rather than putting his pony back up, not when he knew it would just fall again or Lavi would touch it or someone would tug on it or braid it out of boredom. The band always broke during hard fights anyway, and he didn't want to lose his beads. "What's wrong with honesty?" He whispered at the glass, not really looking through it. He heard Lavi sink down on the opposing seat and blinked his eyes shut. It didn't matter if the sky was turning gray with winter, it only mattered that he didn't look at the redhead's reflection. _"Baka Koneko."_

Lavi sighed and leaned down on the seat he had landed on, ears sagging. "What does that eve—" The train blared its whistle as if to cut him off and he threw himself at Kanda, changed his mind, pivoted, and buried his face in the seat corner. He watched from the corner of his eye as Kanda watched him cover his ears, a painfully worried expression on his face – a look that was almost as awkward and face splitting as his smile. The samurai didn't move however, and just watched him suffer in teary-eyed silence until the sound stopped. Lavi twitched a little, but still handled the ordeal better than he had before.

He pushed himself away from the seat with shaking arms and sat cross-legged on the seat cushion. "Thanks for comforting me. Totally appreciate it."

"Che. You weren't hissing, no point."

The apprentice Bookman continued to rub at his left ear with his thumb as he looked at his best friend and frowned, eye narrowed into a line of irritation. "Anyway, what does _Baka Koneko_ mean?" He asked finally, pulling his hand down only to lick the back of it, which he pretended he hadn't done by wiping his saliva swiftly away on his pants. He wasn't that catty – he didn't need to wash his ears with his spit.

Kanda sighed and looked back out the window as he unbuckled his sword to give himself something to lean on while he watched the town they had just gotten to be left behind. At this rate they would be there before nightfall – maybe before lunch if it didn't snow – and the thought contented him a bit. The sooner they got there, the sooner they fixed Lavi the sooner he could have him naked and panting and—

"Yuu. _Boko Kanego._ What's it mean?" Lavi said again, dragging his attention away from what he was doing. "You do _not_ let your mind wander, Yuu-chan… unless you were thinking about—"

The Japanese Exorcist narrowed his eyes with a grunt. "It means stupid kitten."

"Oh." Lavi nodded, letting his hand move back to his ear to scratch at it. "Better than rabbit I guess…" He mumbled as he dropped his hand again and sat on it in an effort to keep from touching his ears again. They felt normal now, like he had gotten used to them, so having the left one itch was the same as having his left eye itch – instinct told him to scratch it whereas the first few days he had only tried for the side of his head. After a moment of stillness in which Kanda just continued to look out the window leaning on Mugen he started at it again. "It's not like… a pet name right? 'Cause I didn't think you ga—"

The look Kanda gave him could have might have molded cheese it was so foul, a sneer with his lips curled back, but there was surprise glimmering in his owlishly wide blue eyes. "Che! I don't give pet names." He barked as menacingly as he could.

On the other side of the door, unheard by the two Exorcists inside, Allen Walker choked on a cackle at the thought of his two homosexual friends calling each other _Cupcake_ and _Teddy Bear._

Lavi managed to smile back flirtatiously, doing his one-eyed wink as he spoke. "If it was…I was just gonna tell you that it's _adorable_, and I don't mind it."

Kanda turned away suddenly, cheeks glowing a frosty sort of rose in the suddenly unbroken sunlight. The blue black sheet of his hair seemed even darker to Lavi with real light on it, and the downward turn of his mouth seemed to be some kind of mystery, parted in an expression of fear despite their lack of trembling. It wasn't lust that moved him slowly across the compartment to touch them either, it was an internal desire to do nothing but appreciate the samurai's unconscious beauty. When his thumb brushed skin and that pair of endlessly deep sapphires turned up at him, no lines of anger around them, only darkened underneath with sleep circles, and fhe found himself speaking illogically, like a Bookman never should.

"Will you say it again, Yuu-chan? Lookin' at me while you do, I mean."

"_Lavi…"_ Kanda's expression was too soft to be real. "Lavi, I…" _Need to tell you something, but that means I have to make my fucking mouth form words that it never has before._ _"Baka Koneko."_ He whispered instead, and the thumb on his lips swept across them in a swift line, leaving them slightly wider than they had been before its passing. His head tilted back, answering an unspoken cue in the fingers gliding toward the back of his neck. With a clumsiness that sent Mugen spiraling onto the floor, Lavi pressed a knee between his legs then moved to straddle him, curling his right hand against the back of Kanda's neck while his left went sailing down his jacket buttons.

The lust that he had lacked had taken root again.

Kanda let his fingers count the bumps of Lavi's vertebrae and turned his face up to accept the open brush of lips on his own. He trembled slightly, fear and desire running through him at once; he leaned into the seat at a second touch of a mouth, hungrier, less shy, and slipped his hands unthinkingly up the back of Lavi's shirt.

The redhead pushed his jacket over his shoulders.

"Yuu-chan…do you…" The apprentice Bookman rocked forward gently and the Japanese man shook his arms out of his sleeves, only vaguely aware of fingers tugging at his shirt again. He became suddenly thankful he hadn't managed to finish what he started in the bathroom. _"Nya_, if you keep this up, I won't last sixteen days." Lavi purred softly and pulled the now blushing face beneath him up to lick the turn of its jaw, looking down at it with a sort of feeling that most of him wanted this. Most of him wanted more.

He moved his arms upward and cast his shirt aside, which distracted him from his best friend's face and neck; though only long enough for a mouth to find the surface of his left nipple. He choked out a moan at it, back arching on its own volition even as he pushed at Kanda's garment, wanting skin.

After a long, wet lap at that little russet nub and a nibble on its neighbor, Kanda pulled away to look up at Lavi's face. He wanted this, every part of it, but taking advantage of the redhead wasn't his plan – he didn't want to push things. Seeing the lusty haze in the apprentice Bookman's left eye reassured him a little, though not enough to stop the slight shaking of his fingers as he moved them in slow, curious circles across the younger man's flesh. As much as he wanted it though, there would be no sex today beyond what had already been done – the feelings were too new for both of them for him to be comfortable with no words between them.

Kanda knew that they needed more than anything to _talk_.

"_Fuck_, Yuu…"

"Che. Don't call me that."

Lavi rocked his hips forward again and pulled open the front of Kanda's shirt, aware that every time he moved Kanda narrowed his eyes at the friction. "You said you didn't mind…"

"You weren't saying _fuck_ before it then."

The redhead frowned a little, not understanding. "What difference does that make?"

"All the difference in the world, retard. You going to move or should I pin you?"

Lavi stopped, sitting as still as he physically could, one hand on the bandage that swathed Kanda's chest, the other fisted in his hair. He slid forward a bit, until his knees came into contact with the back of the seat, his legs clamped around Kanda hips, the evidence of his desire pressed flush against the older man's arousal. Panting heavily and only vaguely aware of a palm on the curve of his backside, Lavi bent downward, another hand guiding him toward Kanda's expectant mouth, sure and fearless and delicious against his tongue. With his fingers trailing up and down the length of the Japanese man's torso he found a number of things he had never noticed before, like the fact that the fabric wrapping now went all the way up he side of Kanda's left shoulder, which was quite a bit farther than he had any specific memory of it going. Neither did he specifically remember when Kanda's shirt had come off behind him.

"Can I—"

"_Nhn."_ No sooner had Kanda given the muffled affirmative that there were fingers touching parts of him that were touched less than even than his supposedly more intimate places. A shudder ripped from the heels of his boots to the back of his neck and he let out a wantonly obnoxious moan, the sensations clamped his right hand on the far side Lavi's pants and the younger man bucked in answer, filling the room with a sound too much like a gasping plea for more of him.

The redhead knew then that if his instinct had anything to do with this at all, they only served to make him needier than he would have been otherwise. The feelings, the emotions, the slight nervousness he felt when Kanda breathed out his name in a near voiceless whisper, it was all his own. Without the feline desires adding fuel to his fire he would have tried to push away his unfaltering want of Kanda with thoughts of Bookman and not interfering, but he couldn't listen to his own thoughts now. He only had Kanda, only _needed_ Kanda, and feeling his suddenly enflamed desires returned by the touch of a mouth on his chest brought a loud, keening sound of desperation from his lips.

_Ok, Yuu-chan. I don't know about fucking, but I'll totally let you lick me whenever the Hell you think it sounds like a good idea._

"Lavi…" Kanda huskily breathed the redhead's name against his first rib on the left side and tried not to groan at the touch of teeth on his right ear. He did groan, trying not to only made it a less clear sound, and his tongue slipped out of his mouth against all too tender flesh; Lavi whimpered at the caress, a tiny rush of blood warming the place Kanda touched. "We can't… do this here…" He managed through a breath that caught in the back of his throat, the redhead had moved on to the sensitive turn of his jaw, sucking and nibbling so he thought he'd be bitten the same as Allen. The apprentice Bookman gently move his hips forward and Kanda found himself all too willing to return the movement. _"Damn it_, Lavi! We can't—"

"Shit, Yuu-chan… I want you so _bad_ right now…" Lavi grumbled into his neck, fully aware of the goosebumps his heavy breathing incited. "_Right now._" He repeated. "It's not a cat thing either. I mean… I wouldn't act on wanting you if I didn't have that… _rawr_ thing in the back of my head, but it's still me. But there are moments – like right now – that you're way so freakin' attractive I can't even think about whether or not I'm emotionally in this or if you're a bottom or what the Hell I'm gonna do whe—"

Allen threw open the compartment door with a flourish, his face a perfectly bright expression of understanding and friendship, not a hair out of place. The expression, coupled with the casual way he leaned in the door and gave his jacket a resolute tug, made both of the shirtless Exorcist's he looked on feel perhaps more naked and awkward than they would subjected to only a single silver eye through a crack in the door. He looked at them both in a long sweeping motion, taking it all in at once; a naked back, a bare chest, reddened lips and bruised collar bones, the connection of Kanda's mouth to the flesh of Lavi's right pectoral muscle – it was all absorbed without a pause. With his teeth fully visible and an all too enthusiastic cock of his head, he spoke.

"Ours is the next stop, so you guys might want to start putting your clothes back on."

Lavi had the heart to bat Kanda away from his chest and cover his nipples.

"Uh, er…ah… ugh – ah…."

"_I am going to kill—"_

"_However did our shirts get off, Yuu-chan?!"_

With a slow, sad shake of his head, Allen pulled away and closed the door.

--

**8D**

**I love awkwardness.  
And readers.  
And reviews.  
And CHOCOLATE.**

**Seeya next chapter! :)**


	10. Enamored and Bewildered

**It's long, but it feels short. How does that work?**

**I do not own -man. If I did… um… I think Allen would be stupider than Kanda. Because you KNOW you want to see them both cheing like Neanderthals.**

**I apologize for using British slang. If it confuses you, tell me. And you can expect it to taper off, as I am lazy…**

**WARNINGS: Um… creepiness? I mean, you KNOW that it's yaoi…**

**-- -- --**

Part Nine: Enamored and Bewildered

The town was much the same as they had left it, though the streets seemed emptier and the people even less friendly. Kanda took note of the slime in the gutters in front of their inn and scowled at it; even if the place was overrun with all manner of creatures in the night it was no reason for there to be filth slumming up the streets in the day, in his opinion. He stepped lightly, hearing Allen and Lavi speaking in quiet voices behind him, and guided their little band into _The Blue Roost_ on obnoxiously loud feet_. _He immediately found himself wishing that Komui had not put them up in the 'best available establishment around' – the best always had an open bar on the first floor and a cellar brimming with alcohol of dubious proof in his experience.

And bars were bad places to look even remotely vulnerable. And by vulnerable he meant _feminine._

A fat man with a despondent mustache turned from the bar the moment he threw the door in, all three of his chins responding to the leer he made in Kanda's general direction. It wasn't long past noon and yet the bulbous Englishman had an unhealthy blush to his cheeks, sausage-sized fingers closed on yet another pint of lager. In a vulgar attempt to seem interested he licked the thumb and forefinger of his right hand before he twisted the edges of his facial hair into unnatural points, lips raised over tobacco yellowed teeth. He then smiled widely, leaned all of his weight back on the bar, and threw his head to the side in order to persuade his voice to produce sound.

"Butchers that tidy would you lads! I think I'd like to get to know her father."

"Clear off, Rube. You're too blooming arseholed to find a pair of knickers in a real bar let alone in this _blinding_ little place here." The response came from behind the bar where a short, brown haired woman stood, scrubbing glasses. She didn't pay much mind to the fat man or to Kanda, but she did lift her eyes at the fact that three warm bodies had come to perhaps buy liquor or rooms. Her eyes, a tawny brown like her hair, noted that the farthest two Exorcist's hoods and then drifted back to the man in front; her mouth turned up in a soft smile. "The best of British to you three. Black Order, yes?" She put her glass lightly on the bar and showed her teeth when Kanda nodded, as if there was someone else she might have expected to walk in wearing their emblem.

Lavi reached out and caught the sleeve of Kanda's coat before he could speak. "That's seven times in two years, isn't it?" He questioned with an audible smile on his lips.

"Che. Stop touching me."

With a cheery smile and a death wish Allen clapped the Japanese man suddenly on the shoulder with enough force to make him forget Lavi was tugging on his clothes. The British boy smiled at the barmaid and tilted his head to that same, outrageously friendly angle, batting his snow white eyelashes delicately. "Ta." He said simply, as if that were a syllable and a word at once. He had never been happier to be British in all of his life when the woman grinned at him, completely ignoring his curse mark and hair. He'd learned the expression just south of Liverpool and it always made him happy when someone recognized it.

"Well then, is it two rooms?"

"No jus—"

"_Please_._"_

The woman had turned her eyes at the last minute before she spoke to a small pad of paper behind the bar, something to keep track of room numbers and the number of occupants and the like, and she looked up at the two voices that instructed her. Her gaze darted from Kanda to Allen and back again, thoughtful. "We've got a reservation for one room, but it's got two beds." She smiled too sweetly at that, giving another nod toward Kanda. "I guess we can hang a sheet if the lady wants her own space."

"Eight."

"Shut the _fuck up_ before I beat you."

"Beat me? I never knew you were into that sort of play, Yuu-chan."

The woman behind the counter made an overly loud gasping sound and threw herself against the bar, pressing her hands on it enough to lift her stocky frame and balance against her hip with her feet off of the floor. Leaning on her right arm she reached out with her left hand and poked the samurai slightly to the right of his chest.

"Cor blimey! You're not a woman!"

Allen was smart enough to take three steps back before he laughed so hard, he worried secretly that he would never be able to breathe properly again.

With a scowl that could have frightened death itself and a growl that rivaled Allen's amusement in volume, Kanda placed a hand firmly on the woman's wrist and shoved it down against the countertop, squeezing just hard enough to cause discomfort. He did not flinch at the touch of Lavi's hand on his shoulder, nor did he pause when he heard the sudden halt of the British boy's laughter. Instead he leaned in close and raised a lip; his voice carried throughout the room in the silence. "Che. If you touch me again, I will break every bone in the hand that you do it with. It doesn't matter if I'm male, or if you think you want to see how soft my hair is, or if you get it in your stupid little head that I'm asking for it – _do not touch me._ Understand?" He waited for her to nod before he let go of her and she fell back hard, bouncing on her cloth shoes against the floor. He held his hand out still, glare unfaltering. "Keys."

"Snapping idea, that one." She bit back harshly. With a quick turn on her heels she reached back and plucked a key from a hanging rack, then lobbed it rather violently at him. He caught it without looking. "Meals are available down here from noon to seven – everyone gets a serving, after that it's first come first served. We don't have breakfast and no drinks in the rooms after eleven thirty, not that I think any of you are old enough to be getting yourselves right bladdered without tipping off someone. If you need anything, or you want to ask questions about what you're looking for, you can ask me, I'm Jillian, or Rube when he's not on the piss like he is now." She pointed to the very back of the room with her chin then, eyes narrowed. "The man in the corner, I don't know his Christian name but the people around him are calling him Mörder, he might know something about the things that go bump in the night. He goes out when they do – and no one goes out when they do anymore. Things have been right bad since the bats started, and I don't encourage you to take a gander unless you're fine with never seeing your Cindy again." She turned away just as Lavi glanced over his shoulder at the man she had indicted, his dirty blonde hair hanging down his shoulders in a mess of dreadlocks and a wide brimmed hat pulled tight against his head, a mug of dark ale in his hands. Lavi couldn't explain it, but even without seeing his face he wanted to shiver.

"Why do they call him Mörder?" He inquired as he strained to pull his eye away. When he turned back the woman was looking up into his hood, searching for his eyes.

"The things out there, the things that bite people and turn them, and murder the weak and sick; he kills them. He doesn't talk much but when he does talk, he's got an accent that can only be from somewhere east of her, so they went with _killer_ in that tongue. He doesn't mind it, or doesn't seem to, but like I said, he doesn't talk about anything most of the time. Just drinks and fights." She sighed, as if remembering something, and picked up the glass she had been shining before. Her brown eyes look slightly sad, as if she were contemplating something distant. After a moment she put the cup down again and forced a smile.

"The number on your key is your room. And… regardless of everything… do save our town."

--- --- ---

"_This one's mine!"_

"No fucking way in _Hell_ I am sleeping with _him_."

"What Kanda? Afraid you might get _boy_ cooties or something?"

"Hey, Moyashi-chan! I'm a guy too."

"Che. I don't give a damn about your stupid girl jokes; I'm _not_ sleeping with Moyashi."

Lavi, who had thrown himself face down on the second bed in order to claim it, rolled unceremoniously onto his back, hood falling away from his head to expose his ears. The cool air had left him pleasantly flushed, and the smile that took his face was made all the more innocent because of it, so he cocked his head to the side to further the illusion. "Well it's not like you'll let Allen and me share, will you Yuu-chan?" His smile cracked wider when Kanda opened his mouth and snapped it shut with a growl. Bull's-eye. "Don't worry. I trust you."

Kanda sighed and swayed on his feet in uncertainty. _"Fine."_ He bit out finally. "If you _touch_ me I'll cut you into ribbons so thin I'll be able to use them as shoelaces." He hissed at Allen, but turned back to Lavi at once, expression less harsh. With a hurriedness and uncaring that made both the redhead and the fifteen year old gasp, he moved himself over the apprentice Bookman, hunching far enough to pin him to the mattress with a long, furious kiss. It took a prolonged moment for Lavi to decide how he wanted to respond and if it was called for, and then his arms were draped around the Japanese man's neck, pulling him gently closer.

"Please do not snog in front of me."

At Allen's words Kanda pulled sharply away to look down at Lavi, sapphire eyes filled with something like regret. "Feelings?" The word could have meant any number of things.

Lavi frowned. "Like… like…"

"Like I do after I eat too much fish. Ugh… I need some air."

"Che. Don't think too hard; what little brain you have will start to melt." Kanda pushed himself up and straightened his jacket, sitting on the bed beside the sprawling redhead. He watched Allen crank open a window and frowned at it – even if it wasn't cold yet it would be by evening. Fall ended long before winter began in England. "I'm leaving." He announced suddenly, and stood up to emphasize his point.

The room was rather large, made for four people despite there only being two double beds. Turning toward the door left Kanda facing away from the window and desk, two stacked chests of drawers on his left and the middle bedside stand on his right, all composed of lacquered pine and polished to shine. By the time he had taken three steps a hand caught his and he paused, having not heard the footsteps. He was only two more from the door.

"Where ya going Yuu-chan?"

"You want to be a cat-person forever?"

Lavi kept a hold of his hand as he thought a bit, not letting him move. There was a growl from behind them and the redhead bit his lower lip at it; if Allen was hungry they would have to work that into the plans, which could turn his ideas around entirely if he wasn't careful. An idea struck him and he held more tightly to Kanda's palm, bouncing on his feet. "I _don't_ want to be a cat-person and lose my mind and blah, blah, blah, so Allen can get himself some grub, and the two of us can investigate together. Sound like a plan?" He grinned at the two of them, not really seeing expressions, until Kanda gave a jerk with his arm and they both moved forward, out of the suddenly opened door. The apprentice Bookman staggered when the samurai slammed it shut behind them and pressed him to the outside, a hand to either side of his face.

"Che. Are you fucking insane?" Kanda ground the words out of his throat, some strange, darker emotion than anger obvious in his eyes. The angle he was leaning at forced him to look up at Lavi, but it didn't diminish his threat any; it made him quite a bit of irritation smashed into that much smaller of a space. "If I have to fight with you I'll be watching your ass instead of killing things." He admitted in a hiss. "I didn't want to say this in front of Moyashi but… if I'm… if you're… because you're stupid… _damn it!_" He shook his head back and forth, once again finding that he failed at human communication, before he took a deep breath and stopped. There was a hand on the side of his face, holding him steady. His throat constricted.

"Are you… worried?" Lavi tried not to look surprised by the idea.

"N…" Kanda wet his bottom lip and closed his eyes, a shudder vibrated up his spine as if he was straining himself against something. Lavi ran his fingers slowly under his left eye, gently, soothing. _"Yes."_ His expression made it obvious that he did not want to, both eyebrows pushed together as if the idea caused him pain, anger burning in his eyes when he opened them, a slight rouge to his cheeks. Lavi stroked his fingers across his left cheek bone to gather his attention.

Tenderly, lacking the wild abandon he had shown on the train by climbing into Kanda's lap, Lavi guided the Japanese man into a slow, shallow kiss. Employing every trick he knew, closing his eye, praying that no one saw – he tried to _feel_ it. A little flame of something danced awake in his chest and he held on to it mentally, slipping his tongue against the gradual parting of Kanda's lips. It took a good five seconds for him to get tongue to brush back at his, two more until a hand against his chest, and another three for the samurai to moan and rock on his feet in encouragement, pushing him harder against the door.

He pushed back gently and Kanda fell away easier than he thought he would, though he left his hand on Lavi's chest while the other rested beside his head. The redhead swallowed. "I swear, I'll be fine, Yuu-chan. I know what we're up against this time, so I won't do anything stupid." His eye flicked back and forth between the facets of the shorter man's gaze, searching. That flurry of fire was there, nameless, burning up his chest, and he couldn't bring himself to smother it when he could see it reflected so surely that pair of gemlike eyes. "Besides, we have bigger problems between us than you picking off akuma that look like they wanna dust me."

"Che. Like what?"

"Well… I know that you like me and wanna touch me and stuff and… but… I still need to think. You know that I'm not supposed to be like that back. I mean… if Bookman found out that I just kissed you and _meant_ it, my ass would be a footnote in Bookman history at the minimum and there's this cat thing and I jus—"

"I love you."

Lavi stepped back so suddenly he brought his head into sharp contact with the door. His jaw fell open and a tiny, strangled sound of negation came out of his mouth, too soft to really be heard, too loud to be denied. Jerkily he pulled his hands away before he put them back again at the shadow of pain that passed over Kanda's face. Understanding eluded him. Feeling didn't make sense anymore. There was just his back against the wooden door and a sensation like ice sinking into his gut.

"Tha-tha – Yuu…" He scrambled for a moment against the obstruction behind him as if he wanted to dart away from the samurai, but something held him in place. He was breathing erratically, fingers shaking as he ran a hurried hand through his hair between his ears. "Did you just – I think you just – that doesn't make – I… do you…" He stopped trying to run away the moment Kanda pulled back and faced the opposite wall, standing with his spine so straight it was obvious how unsettled he was.

Kanda bit his lower lip. "Che. Never mind, _Baka Koneko._"

"No! Wait!" Lavi launched himself off of the door and caught Kanda around the middle, burying his face in the man's back. Before it would have been a surefire way to get himself threatened with Mugen, punched, kicked in the face, or worse, but now the Japanese man just stiffened like a board in his arms. He didn't like this different reaction – it made him feel like an outsider, no longer trusted, like someone had reached into him and tried to touch something that wasn't supposed to be there. "Tell me what it feels like." He said in a rush. "Tell me if there's tightness in your chest and a sort of pain in your middle and if you want to show me how you feel by to—" He stopped when he found himself against the wall, not kissed though their mouths were impossibly close without actually touching, fingers in his hair and a hand on his right hip while a knee pressed too close to his own. Somehow, despite their closeness, the Japanese man looked angry. He tried to find something to say in that instant, to make it alright, but there was nothing but silence in his mouth.

Kanda did something then that Lavi wasn't expecting; he tilted his head slightly to the side and let out a low, shaky laugh. The sound wasn't as creepy as his chuckle was, but it lacked the mirth of a well used one, cracking oddly in the back of his throat. Lavi pressed himself further into the wall. "Wait, Lavi?" He asked when he stopped abruptly. "You want me to wait for you so you can decide if you want me? You want me to just stand here and let you fuck around in your head to find out if you don't just want sex from me? Great idea. _You _go ahead and wait. In the meantime I'll be out in the real world looking for a way to keep you human, that way _I_ can _wait_ indefinitely for a time when you know what l-lo-love is." Stammering over the word didn't make it any less biting, he knew, so Kanda didn't let that little slip get to him. Instead he placed a delicate kiss on the turn of the redhead's jaw and backed away, holding his eye as he did. "I don't care if you feel it. I don't care if you ever can. I'm getting what I want from you because I want it." He finished, and not a moment too soon.

Allen opened the door behind him and poked his head out, a frown tugging down the corners of his lips. He looked back and forth between Lavi and Kanda without his expression changing, then down the hall in either direction before his eyes settled on the flustered looking redhead across from him. He smiled. "I thought I heard laughter." He explained without really saying anything and turned his eyes to Kanda. It didn't take a genius to see that the Japanese man was looking to be accused. "I guess not. I'm heading down to get some second lunch; do you two want to meet here at sundown? I can investigate well enough on my own." He gave a little knowing grin and tipped his head to the side, daring someone to argue.

Kanda didn't feel like rising to the occasion. "Che. Fine. Sundown. Don't stay out afterward alone because I am _not _going to come looking for you."

"I wouldn't want you to. It's better not have someone follow you to their death, don't you agree?"

"Shut up, Moyashi." Kanda began to stomp away angrily, hair swishing back and forth as he walked. Lavi stood across from Allen and watched him go, thoughtfully, mulling over those three little words that had somehow ended up between them.

"Any idea what's got his panties in a pinch?" Allen whispered when the samurai turned down the stairs toward the main bar.

"His ass cheeks?"

The British boy snorted. "Whatever the case may be… good luck with him."

"Thanks." Lavi sighed. "I'll need it."

--- --- ---

Kanda discovered that he couldn't pay attention to half of what he should have been when he was beating himself to death repeatedly in his mind. Standing in front of Mörder's table while Lavi talked to the man didn't even tempt him to make conversation; he just stood there and absorbed what was said without listening. It didn't really matter when Lavi was taking it all in like a Bookman should – and looking ever so wonderful while he did it. The Japanese Exorcist took a moment to imagine himself falling painfully to his death at that thought, and then upped the violence to landing in a flaming pit of spines when he remembered those stupid words that had fallen out of his mouth earlier. So stupid. It wasn't as if he had _meant_ to be angry at Lavi's reminder of his origins – it just happened, and then he had to go and _confess his love_ like they were old and it mattered or something.

The redhead looked at him and cocked an eyebrow at his silence. Kanda glared back relentlessly. There was no reason to be nice about such things as this.

"The graveyard okay, Yuu?" Lavi asked, giving him enough of a hint to guess what else had been said in the conversation. Mörder must have informed them that the most activity was taking place in the graveyard and so they should look there for any evidence pertaining to Innocence – so he nodded. "Ok. Thanks." He said the last word to Mörder before he wandered off toward the door and Kanda followed, eyes glued to the turn of his hips despite his unwillingness to look at them. The samurai bit the tip of his tongue as they left _The Blue Roost,_ and moved to walk beside the redhead, in no need of a guide from his prior escapades there. He moved in silence.

Lavi checked his hood, gave him a glancing look, shoved his hands into his pockets, and attempted to do the same.

He failed.

"Yuu-chan, are you… ok?" They weren't a block away from the inn yet, feet crunching on what remained of the morning's frost. He didn't look when he asked.

Kanda didn't look when he answered. "Che."

"I just… wanted to tell you that I'm…" Lavi kicked what he thought was a rock and frowned when it turned out to be a road apple. That was all he needed, horse shit on his boots. "I'm gonna tell Old Panda that I'm seeing someone when we get back. He won't like it, but he won't care as long as it doesn't change how I record this war. If… things get serious – _more_ serious than they are – this will be my last one. I'll be Lavi forever…" He fell into a thoughtful silence then broke it before Kanda could comment. "You see, that's what happens to Bookman who can't… _not_ feel. They can't go back to being who they were born being because that person wouldn't know what to do with everything they've seen, so they get stuck being the one that can feel. It also keeps us from being marked as husband thieves and wife corruptors, you know, when people _really _fall off the wagon." He tried to chuckle but the sound died prematurely. He dragged his soiled foot across the pavement and his face fell even further; he was too adverse to silence. With a hard swallow and slight turning of his head he mumbled again just so Kanda could hear: "Are you ok with me telling Gramps that it's you?"

"Che. I don't care."

"He'll know you're gay."

"Like I give a damn what that old bastard knows about me."

"And he'll most likely write it down for other people to read later."

"So?"

"And you'll be remembered as the pretty gay Exorcist, Kanda Yuu."

"You fucking call me pretty and I'll poke out your eye."

Lavi snorted. "Like I said before, you _are_ hot. But Panda doesn't use terms like _'freakin' gorgeous slice of man-flesh'_ or '_succulent male eye-candy'_ or '_so fucking attractive you'll forget all about Eliade.'_ He uses terms like… _'aesthetically enduring'_ and _'pleasing to the eye.'_"

"Che. I can see why he hits you so much."

"Why's that?"

"You're a fucking moron."

The redhead let his face lift into a playful frown and elbowed the man beside him in the ribcage, though only hard enough to bump him toward the gutter without hurting. He caught a glimpse of teeth and thought Kanda was smiling – a thought that somehow made his stomach grow tight with something fluttery; he wanted to make Kanda smile. "I'm not a moron." He said from the side of his mouth.

"And I'm not an Exorcist."

"Oh – my – dear – Lord! Is that sarcasm?! I didn't know you knew the meaning of the word!"

"Which makes you more of a moron."

"Holy crap, I'm losing an argument to Yuu-chan."

"Actually I'm flirting with you."

"Oh. Wai-What?!" Lavi stammered for a moment before he found an arm pressed just against the small of his back, gentle fingers flitting on his opposite hip. Excitement shot through him – as well the scent of sweat and soap and sex – strong enough to make his knees feel weak and speed his heart in his chest. Before he could stop himself he leaned into the Japanese man, overcome with a sort of hunger that brought his shaded face just close enough for his mouth to touch skin. At once he recoiled, stepping back into the hand that, in the course of the half second it had taken for him to move, had not withdrawn. "Sorry… automatic response to closeness is _licking_." He explained quietly.

"Che. I don't care."

Lavi looked sidelong at the samurai to find he had turned his head pointedly away. He followed the turn of Kanda's eyes in a long, sweeping arch across the street to a very ugly old steeple, the right arm of which was bent downward, the left pushed up at the same angle. He frowned at it, scanning the tar and shingle roof with his eyes, catching on the gutters, pausing at the fogged stained glass windows, and finally shook his head at it. There was no good reason that folk as these, who held so firmly to their faith, should let their house of worship fall into such disrepair. The red painted door was crooked on its hinges and peeling, water warped, and the stairs not two meters in front of it hadn't faired any better, thick on either side with winter brambles. Somehow, despite the fact that he had been brave enough to walk right into Crowley's castle, he couldn't stand the thought of walking passed the pair of gargoyles that stood guard just outside of the wrought iron gate, winged and clawed and ferocious.

His palms started to sweat.

"Lavi?" Kanda had taken a step and noted his reluctance, elegant eyebrows pushed together in an expression of concern. The redhead reached back and took a firm hold of the samurai's hand, even though it took away the small level of comfort his arm had brought. He knew Kanda could feel the slickness of his fingers.

"Maybe I'm more werecat than we thought, Yuu-chan." He muttered without moving. Under his hood his ears were pressed as close to his skull as he could keep them, twitching in discontent, and he had to fight down the urge to take off his hood and run away. "I _really_ don't want to go in there. I don't know why but… if I go in there… I dunno what will happen but it will be bad. It's like… it makes my ears buzz." As he spoke the Japanese Exorcist took a step closer, pulling him along, and he stepped after him with unsure feet, trembling. A wave of shock crashed over him when Kanda paused to examine him with eyes that were not glaring but instead drawn into curious circles, worried.

The samurai touched the redhead's forehead and frowned. "Che. Try and stand it for as long as you can. For all we know it's Innocence doing it to you, your ears might work like a dowsing rod." He gave another little tug on Lavi's hand and guided him forward, not four steps from crossing the gate now. The apprentice Bookman was shivering to the point of it being a hindrance by the time he was two steps back. "Come on."

"Can't."

"Yes, you can."

"I'll have a heart attack."

"It's a church, _Baka Koneko._ Nothing is going to eat you."

"Really? How is it that we got into this mess again?"

"Che."

"I'll just wait out here for you. Go around the back and see if I can get in that way. Something."

"Moron." Kanda gave a savage jerk of his arms and brought the suddenly terrified redhead against his chest to wrap both of his arms around him. He took the last few steps they needed and stopped just inside the church grounds, feeling hands pressing on his ribcage, and waited to see if Lavi crumbled or died or what. The apprentice Bookman held on to him fiercely, but nothing happened for a long moment. He took a second to feel a bit like an adult holding on to a frightened child.

Lavi felt as if he wanted nothing more than to run away, but knew he couldn't, not in daylight when there were people and not when he could be mauled by something dangerous. So he did what he could to remove himself from the situation. With a deep, shaking breath he thought of every akuma he could recall easily, every moment of panic that he had ever felt, and tried to compare all of that pain and terror to this one ugly churchyard – because the weeds were not that scary and a broken cross would not shoot him when he had his back turned. Though his heart kept slamming against his ribs he sighed, forcing calm through his body using only his thoughts. Kanda helped. If it wasn't for the press of a warm body against his and arms twined around his back, he would have failed miserably – there would have been nothing but the pain in his head and the fear stealing away his movement.

He pushed himself up but didn't let go. The last thing he wanted to do was let go.

"Yuu-chan… let's… get this over with."

"_Baka Koneko."_

"Hm?"

Kanda reached down and stroked an ear through the fabric of Lavi's hood, wordlessly. His fingers danced from the back of his head to his neck and then down to his shoulders in lazy lines, thumping as they went, then finally came to the small of the redhead's back. The samurai was perfectly aware of the curious green eye that looked up at him as well as the twitching fingers against his coat.

"If you do this…when… we're finished," The dark haired man's voice was so quiet; Lavi almost couldn't make out the words. "I am going to… to… to…"

"Dance in a tutu?"

"_Never mind_, retard_."_ Kanda pushed Lavi away to arm's length and let go with a shift of his whole body toward the side of the church. He began walking, boots smashing on the cobblestone way, with a vigorousness and stiffness that could only come from frustration and anger. Truthfully he had nearly done something very stupid and astoundingly embarrassing, only having caught himself just before the words '_take a bath'_ and '_will you join me'_ could fight their way out of his mouth. There were more things wrong with that than he cared to think about. Like being naked together. And wet. And hot. And him _inviting_ Lavi to join him.

Power walking around the side of the building, he scowled at the appearance of the graveyard and, just beside it, the place he had buried the first monster that had attacked him; looking at it brought up a number of other memories.

Like kissing Lavi in the tavern.

Which, for some reason, they hadn't talked about.

He wasn't sure how to feel about that being Lavi didn't remember. Happy, satisfied, angry, thoughtful – in the end he ended up frustrated and unwilling to make conversation, which wasn't the reaction he was supposed to have to the memory of his first kiss.

They stayed together, though they didn't talk while they worked. Kanda walked the front of the cemetery on contemplative feet while Lavi stood behind him, watching him more than he was watching the burial grounds. Quietly Lavi thought about what Kanda had meant to say while he studied the shine of his hair in the sun, as well as the lay of his coat –little things, like the way Kanda paced when he thought, and the way his pants flared over the tops of his boots. And the way Lavi could only see his boots when he turned and the wind lifted his overcoat away from his feet, and the fact that he had far longer legs than he was given credit for. It was all right there for him to see and analyze, and to distract him from the task at hand.

_What were we doing again?_

"Che. They're empty." Kanda said suddenly, crouching next to the gravestone marked _Olivia Ross_, the dates faded from disrepair. His expression was emotionless for a long moment before he laid a palm on the fresh looking dirt over the grave and scowled, curling his fingers in the dirt.

Lavi took a moment to memorize the length of his fingers and think about them – and where he wanted them to be.

_Stop it. Stop. It. He's trying to say what he thinks happened._

"Wha-what do you mean empty?" _Oh yeah, you can hear what I'm thinking about, right there in that tremble. If he were Bookman trained, he'd punch my lights out._

"The graves." The older Exorcist answered without pause. "There aren't any bodies."

"You can tell by looking?"

Kanda shifted forward onto his knees and pressed his right hand against the earth only to have it sink easily to his elbow. The little surprised sound Lavi made didn't do the act justice. "Che. Tunnels, handmade, every one in this row is like it. The soil just covers the top. Like something tried to dig their way in."

"Or out." Lavi added quietly. "Do you really think Innocence could do this?"

The samurai shook his head and pulled out his grime covered hand with a glare; he really would be taking a bath when they got back, with Lavi or otherwise. "I don't know."

Lavi shifted on his feet for a moment, looking over his shoulders passed his hood with difficulty. After a moment he looked back at Kanda and blinked, determined not to let the words _'will you bend over like that again' _come out of his mouth, and coughed. As not to be filleted on the spot he went with what his ears told him instead of his head. "Can we _go?_ My ears are killing me and I'm about ready to jump you or run. I feel like someone's lurking around a corner looking at me like I might make a tasty meal." He bounced on his feet anxiously and smashed his left hand into his hood to itch at his ears – because he wasn't lying, he really wanted them uncovered as soon as it was safe to do so.

"We haven't searched half of it."

"There's fresh soil on all thirty-sex mounds I can see from here. I think we can assume they're all like that."

"Six."

"What?"

"You said thirty-sex."

"Haha. Right, Yuu-chan, you wish I'd said it."

"Che." Kanda didn't feel like arguing over something so poignantly pointless and so pushed himself to standing, eyeing the redhead thoughtfully as he did. A strange, childish desire almost overwhelmed him in that moment, what with his hand covered in dirt and Lavi looking at him like the last thing he ever expected was to be finger painted on, but then the notion passed and he was left with a little lift to his lips. Instead he moved forward recklessly, knowing he was absolutely going to stick his foot in his mouth as soon as physically possible, and thinking that maybe, somehow, that was the best thing to do in this situation.

Lavi had the time to step back against the gate before a mud covered hand slipped across the side of his cheek, fingers carding in his hair, and a mouth pressed against his. For once he had the physical control to take Kanda by the shoulders and push him away, though the moan in his throat negated the action in principle. The Japanese man stayed where he was though, with his hand on Lavi's face, and the redhead panted at him with his eye turned down toward his lips.

"Don't do that here."

"Why not?"

"Someone will see."

"Fuck 'em."

"_Yuu…"_ Lavi held the smaller man in place despite the fact that he wanted nothing more than to let him do what he wanted. He licked his lips and swallowed, hating that pair of gently parted lips as much as he wanted to touch them. "If we… go back before Allen we can… maybe… do this and talk but… we _really_ shouldn't do it where someone might scream _Sodomites_ and run to get the militia." He saw the flash of anger on Kanda's face and shook his head, showing his frustration. The display made the Japanese man pause enough for him to find his breath and speak again. "I want to. Trust me. We shouldn't do it here." He tried to clarify.

Kanda opened his mouth and waited for something ridiculous to fall out. "We can't go asking people to help us when there's dirt on your face." The words sounded almost maternal to Lavi, he could tell by the way his eyebrows suddenly pressed together in confusion. "What I mean to say is… we could both use a bath. And…" He wished that he really did have a flaming, spine bottomed pit to leap into when he said it with that uncertain pause in his voice, like something Allen would do when warming up to tell him bad or embarrassing news. "I would be willing… to share…"

Lavi visibly shivered. "You mean… me – in the water. With you."

"Che. And maybe… my hands… in your soap."

"_Fuck,_ that's not even dirty and I'm blushing."

"You're… c-cu-cute when you blush."

"You _fail_ at seduction but it's _adorable_ that you stutter."

"Then the thought of being naked and wet in a space so close you can't help but touch me isn't seductive enough for you?"

"Yuu-chan…can we _go?_" Lavi rocked back on his feet as he asked, pulling Kanda with him. A part of him screamed that it was irresponsible to go back this soon, that Allen would still be eating in the room and so forth, but he couldn't make himself listen to it with Kanda leaning closer. The tender brush a mouth on the edge of his lips made him shiver, his fingers drifted to the curve of Kanda's back and fisted there. "You think… getting this out of our systems will make… wandering around together easier?" He breathed down at the samurai and the glazed eyes that looked up at him seemed to smile without meaning to.

The Japanese Exorcist tried to frown. "Che. If it doesn't, you're working with Moyashi."

"Aw… Yuu, that's no fair."

"We can't let this stab us in the back." He insisted, and he painted a line of reddish dirt down to Lavi's collar bone. The apprentice Bookman hadn't seemed to notice. "Getting you killed is no longer on my priority list."

"It was?"

"When you would annoy me."

"So… all the time?"

"Basically."

Lavi would have shaken his head if his face weren't inches from Kanda's, just waiting to be touched, asking for it, begging. With his eye half hooded and his cold fingers trembling against fabric, there was little he could do anymore besides talk. He shivered harder. "If we don't go now, I'll kiss you." His voice was little more than a breeze against the shorter man's skin, he knew. It was an invitation, and Kanda took it before he could stop himself; Lavi slipped his leg around the side of Kanda's body to pull him closer. The hand that had been tracing the line of his throat shifted just too much and pushed his hood down around his shoulders. Their lips touched.

The little flicker of heat in Lavi's chest burned brighter.

_He said he loved me._

His mind was cut off from that train of thought at the sound of ruffling cloth and the contact of his back and iron fencing, cool and hard against his skin regardless of the shirt and jacket he still wore. They were painfully close, flesh just brushing, and he inhaled sharply, the heat in his chest moving quick and hot to his face. Emotionally he was at a loss to say what he felt besides _warm_, but he didn't mind the strange numbness that followed that thrill of yearning and the burn of desire. It reminded him, just like the gate at his back, of where they were.

"_Nya—"_ He clapped his mouth shut when that came out, having intended something far less feline. He swallowed hard before he tried again, this time with his hand moving to Kanda's hips while he did. "Yuu-chan, can I… reciprocate this time? As awkward as it was having you touch me, I wanna…"

Kanda nodded, obviously thinking about stepping back now that there were words between them again. "If you know that you want to."

"I want to."

"Che. If you _neow_ – or whatever the sound is in English, I forget – at me while you're doing it, it's over until the ears are gone."

"But if the ears aren't _ever_ gone—"

"I'll fuck you with my eyes closed for my own sake."

A shiver ran up Lavi's spine and down again. "I wish you wouldn't say it like that."

"Hn. Why not?"

"Because… I dunno… it makes my chest feel funny."

"I bet it makes your pants feel funny, too."

"Do not mock my attraction to you, I can say no to that bath if I really, really, really, really feel like – oh my _God_, Yuu. Put Mugen away!"

The samurai let his face lift into one of his crooked sneers and stepped away, sheathing his half drawn sword as he did. The expression proved just how empty of a threat it had been, but Lavi's ears stayed back as if in anger, his lower lip pressed out in irritation. "Che." Kanda reached out and took a hold of Lavi's hood to yank it over his ears once more. "Let's go." He growled before turning away with that same, perpetual air of indifference.

Lavi caught up with him with a lingering glance back at the graveyard. Even now, with Kanda looking back to take him by the hand and the little light of amusement dancing in his eyes, something felt wrong here.

_Sixteen days…_ He thought without letting his smile waver. _If we find it, if we change me back… will I want to take his hand anymore?_

-- -- --

**Next chapter shall be less meh, more moaning. :)  
Promise.**

**Also, I am dreadfully sorry if I didn't answer your review, but FF is having trouble with their reply system – I cannot reply as things are. If the problem continues, I will PM people starting with this chapter.**

**You like?**


	11. Revelation and Refusal

**Oh gosh. An update. I think it's late. Life has been… hectic. And the chapter wanted to go on for days, so I had to find a place to chop it. The next chappy is already 3 pages though! So no long update wait. 8D**

**Also, sorry that I didn't answer a lot of reviews, first FF was having issues, then my comp restarted itself and I lost all of my tabs and half of this chapter, and really, it was just no fun. I figure an update is better than days of waiting for me to wade through my inbox to answer reviews, ne?**

**Disclaimer: I do not own -man. If I did… Kanda would have a hard life. –Rimshot-**

**WARNINGS: If you are afraid of man-sex, hide your eyes.**

**-- -- --  
**

Part Ten: Revelation and Refusal

"I've been thinking."

"Che. Do you ever _stop_ thinking?"

"…No…"

Kanda, with his eyes focused mostly on his boots, scoffed at the silence. "What?"

"Jill said the guy with the dreads was named in a language to the east, but they call him _killer_ in German. All of the German speaking countries I know of are _south_ of here, you know? So… do you think she's just really dumb, or what?" Lavi was walking with his hands up behind his hood scratching his ears on the occasion that he didn't think anyone would see. The sun played off of the red of his jacket softly, shining from the little tassel on its front with more sparkle than usual, though Kanda figured his own way of seeing affected his perspective a little. All the same, he didn't give it credit for how much his mind wandered off to think about the redhead's looks these days.

Kanda sighed from beside him. _We shouldn't be going back. We have work to do._ "Stupid."

"Hm. Figured."

The Japanese man hated to leave things undone, but he couldn't figure which was more important at the moment, Lavi or the Innocence. In any other situation he would have known the Innocence was what needed his utmost attention – akuma, death, suffering, fear, misunderstandings, could all be avoided if they just went out and finished their mission and went home. But, with the redhead seeming so focused on touching him and sexual thoughts witling away at his theories before he could even start them, he knew that it would be better this way. If they went back to _The Blue Roost _and did enough touching and feeling and humping to relieve a bit of the tension, he would be able to go out into the graveyard and search every muddy millimeter of it without thinking about anything outside of his skin. Or below his belt. Or below Lavi's belt, most of all.

He was more than thankful when he saw the faded blue door of their inn come into sight, looming like a patch of sky amongst the gray clouds of brick and thatch. They weren't even to the door yet and he was trying to envision how things might play out, how far they would go, what he wanted to do and for how long. He wanted his mind to be on the Innocence. He wanted to think about just how much gunk there was on his boots. He wanted to focus on _anything_ but the ritualistic way he took off his clothes before he bathed and what Lavi would think about it.

Did the apprentice Bookman hang up his used towels to save water, too? Did he use soap on his hair? Would he want clear water or bubbles? Would he laugh when Kanda put his hair up so he wouldn't have it hanging in the water after he'd washed the grime from the rest of him? Would the redhead try to compare them when they were naked? Would he blush as adorably the same way he had before? Would Lavi mind when he pinned him to the bottom of the tub and—

"Lavi calling Yuu-chan, Lavi calling Yuu-chan! We have arrived."

"Che. Shut up."

"Wouldn't have to do it if you weren't off in a different world while I'm holding the door."

"Don't treat me like a woman; it opens inward." Kanda growled as if that were a good reason not to treat him like a lady, and stormed inside with the most scathing death-glare he had managed in a week. No one looked up and suggested that he was worth flirting with this time, though the idiot behind the counter cracked a smile at him, polite now that she knew that he could kill her with his pinky finger, blindfolded. Stupid people were always like that. He walked right passed her without looking and tromped up the stairs without another thought as to what he left behind him – the exception being the sound of Lavi's boots following him up the stairs.

Goosebumps blossomed on his right wrist and spiraled up his arm before sliding down his left, curling tight around his muscles as they went, making him shake. He wasn't scared – no, nothing could _frighten_ him anymore – he was filled to brimming with anticipation. This day, a Wednesday if he wasn't mistaken, would be one of the most memorable in his life.

When his fingers found the knob of the door, cold and hard and just as bronze has he had left it, he twisted it, and breathed out a slow breath when it came open without use of the key. He walked in as if he belonged there, expecting Allen to pop out and explain that he was just heading out when he finished this serving of food, but it didn't happen. The room was entirely bare.

"Che. The brat didn't lock the room when he left." Kanda observed with a hint of relief in his voice. Lavi followed him in with a similar air, glancing left and right to be sure that they were not discovered before he let out a slow, deep sigh and pushed the door closed. The older Exorcist spared him a glance to find him leaning ever so surely against it, smiling, the material of his hood gathered around his shoulders, ears perked in anticipation.

"I don't think he could, you have the keys." Lavi observed quietly. He stayed where he was for a moment and watched as Kanda moved to the bed that he and Allen had been relegated to and started on his boots, unbuckling and zipping with a purposefulness that made the redhead's heart leap into his throat and stay there. He watched them come off while he fingered the lock behind him and thought about the deadbolt against his shoulder, his mouth too moist even as his lips started to feel dry. He had never thought, not once in his life, that this would happen. He had never imagined that he'd be thinking about locking the door to the room that he and his best friend might christen sometime in the evening. The thought was so distracting that he didn't actually manage to lock the door at all.

When Kanda was finished he gave the apprentice Bookman a pinning glance and cocked his head in the direction of the bathroom door. "What?" There was nothing demanding in the word, nothing hidden or asked for, it was just an interrogative that made Lavi see any number of things wrong with the situation.

For the first time since the whole ordeal had began, Lavi wanted to talk.

He rocked forward on his feet and moved toward the bed just as the Japanese man migrated into the bathroom, tugging at the fasteners of his jacket, scowling. Lavi didn't watch him as he lowered himself to the mattress and started to undo the much less complicated system that held his boots on his feet. "Yuu, you're ok with this even though you're… you know… a lifetime ahead of me in emotional investment? Wait, that didn't sound right. I mean… it's just that you said you loved me and I don't wanna… _shit_ there's no way to say this without it sounding bad is there?" He asked himself rather than Kanda as his right boot thumped down beside him, followed swiftly by his left. Shoeless, he stood up and dragged off his socks before he wandered after the samurai, willing himself not to play with his gloves and to just take them off and stuff them in his pockets.

Kanda was looking at the collection of toiletries that the three of them had brought with a mystified look on his face when Lavi came in, his expression perhaps just as lost as Lavi felt.

The moment the Japanese man saw the redhead in the mirror he flattened his expression into a scowl. "Che. If you're asking me if I care that you don't love me, the answer is no. You don't have to."

"That kinda hurts."

"Really? Try my end." Kanda said the words without looking at him and picked up a bottle of purple bubble bath, raising a lip at the label. _Delicate Lavender Breeze, for Sensitive Skin. What man would use this shit?!_ His brain demanded in an effort _not_ to see the genuinely apologetic expression looking over his shoulder at his reflection. Just as he put the bottle back a pair of arms twirled around his waist and leaned him forward, which brought his eyes to the face pressed over his right shoulder in the mirror. The widened quality to his eyes and the slight part of his lips told him that even if he didn't really feel it, he was surprised. And Lavi, as far as he could see, obviously felt like an asshole. He watched the pair of lips that came into soft, warm contact with the side of his ear and shivered. The fingers of his left hand touched one of the forearms that held him so close.

"I'm sorry." The words were a warm rush of air that brought a hot rush of blood to his cheeks. "I really wish I knew if I did, but I've never loved anyone. Even Bookman. He's like my father, I call him Grandpa, but I don't love him. I would be sad if I lost him, but I'd be sad if I had a pet dog that died, too."

"Che. I'm not your bitch, asshole."

"I would never want you to be." Lavi's arms tightened, his face pressed against the skin of Kanda's neck. He ran his lower lip between his teeth before he went on, and the samurai gave him the time he needed to find the words. "What I _can_ say is that… it's _me_ who wants to take your clothes off and see you naked. And it's _me_ that feels nervous when I see you looking at me. And it hurts when you say that it doesn't matter, and I don't want to hurt you, and so many other things that I just shouldn't feel. You… when you're all flirty and honest with how you think, not just scowling because it seems like the thing to do, make me into like this little ball of warm fluffy stuff with a candle in my middle. Is it love? I dunno. But I feel it." His fingers trembled ever so gently as he ran them up to the last button Kanda had gotten to and tugged it open, slowly pulling just enough to get it loose before moving to the next, gradual and yet certain. The material of the jacket wasn't very pleasant, at least not on the outside, but Lavi's callused fingertips moved across it easily, all the way to Kanda's hips as he went on. "'Course, it helps that you've got legs that don't quit and all of this hair but…" The coat came open and he started on the shirt beneath it, faster now, being he was much more used to shirts than he was the new buttons on their uniforms. "In the end, I think you mean more to me than whoever that guy was who kissed me here last time, even if it was better than a lot of what you've done."

Kanda's face cracked into a wide, crooked smile. It had been a number of years since Kanda had seen himself grin into a mirror and he didn't see it now, he was too focused on Lavi's face to draw his own into focus. "Che. You're a real idiot if you haven't figured out that _I _kissed you, nitwit. Maybe blood loss made it great, but it was just as horrible as all th—_hm?_" He found himself stopped with Lavi's mouth against his, the angle awkward, the redhead's front pressed partially to his side, a hand still pulling at the wrapping on his chest. He turned instinctively and let his fingertips find the topmost button of Lavi's coat.

By the time he was shirtless and Lavi half as far, his lower back was pressed too hard into the counter for comfort and he leaned a bit to the side, thus knocking over every bottle of frilly girlie soap the other two had brought with them. The redhead didn't seem to mind however, and simply moved away from his mouth down his jaw while the fingers of his left hand found a nipple.

A sinking cold feeling filled Kanda's gut when he realized just how submissive he was being. That wasn't how he wanted this, not now or ever as far as he was concerned. "Che. Wait." His voice came out ragged, heavy, half like he didn't want Lavi to stop. The apprentice Bookman withdrew as if it hurt to do so, green eye focused down on Kanda's face, panting, unwilling to move back anymore. There was something in his expression that Kanda hadn't seen before, something that was more serious than laughter and brighter than anger, an emotion just overshadowed with lust. He felt his breath catch.

"Sorry," Lavi whispered down at him, changing the weight on his feet without stepping back. "Just… I don't think you realize how much I've been thinking about that kiss and… if it was you then I don't really have a reason to be shy anymore. I wanted to find the person who did it and ask them why, but I know _why_ you did it."

"Che. So now what? You think because I kissed you then I'll let you do this now?"

"Huh?" The redhead found himself pressed slowly back against the opposite wall by a hand resting in the center of his chest, his shirt coming open as he moved. The Japanese man didn't touch him otherwise, just held him with that hand against his skin, his expression serious. Lavi floundered for words for a long moment, not understanding what it was that Kanda thought he meant to do, not with his hands so steady and his face so perfectly set.

The samurai cupped the side of his face with his free hand, dropping his voice to a dangerous growl. "You don't love me; you don't get to even _try_ to do that to me. I'll kill you first."

"Do what?"

"Che." Kanda furrowed his brow at the thought of Lavi actually having no idea what he was talking about. The redhead was more perverted than the whole of the science department combined and he didn't know how things worked? That seemed ridiculous. "Treating me like a woman." He bit out at last, and the wave of realization spread across the apprentice Bookman's face at it, followed by something like fear, and then determination. Kanda could see the gears spinning behind his eye, as well as the mental images, and prepared himself for an argument that he was not willing to lose.

Lavi blinked his eye shut and tilted his body forward, then swallowed audibly. "Oh." He managed at last. "I won't um… argue with that. Not until I think we might… if we ever… would you fill the tub already? We aren't getting any cleaner." He changed the subject rather than talking about this now. He'd blush so hard his head would explode if they did. Yet all the same he kind of wanted Kanda to ignore him, kind of wanted the older Exorcist to just force his hand like he had before, but it didn't happen.

He was left sagging limply against the wall while Kanda moved back to the tub and set the plug, then started the water, relief obvious on his face. Despite his hard exterior, it was plain to be seen that he was just as nervous and unsure as Lavi – the way he looked at the different soaps he had knocked over proved it.

Lavi wondered what made Kanda frown at the water so deeply for a moment before he decided that he would ask.

"Che." Kanda cut him off before he had started. "We should be working."

"We _can't_ work, obviously. Besides, we've got time."

"It would be better not to risk it."

"I dunno. Maybe we should talk about… stuff. As much as I wanna do things with you I also wanna make sure we're not… gawky."

"Heh." The Japanese man seated himself on the closed toilet and reached out to feel the water with his clean hand, then turned the hot knob farther. His face in the steam and his hair hanging down his back like a sheet of night sky draped across his shoulders made Lavi smile a little; Kanda wasn't glaring anymore and a bit of the tension was gone from his back as if his words had soothed him despite the monosyllabic response he had gotten. That was something.

"How come you glare all the time?"

"I want to glare?" Kanda's voice reflected the fact that he thought the question was stupid.

"Why do you want to glare?"

"I feel like glaring."

"Why do you feel like glaring?"

"Because I'm angry."

"Why are you angry?"

"Do you _want_ me to hit you?"

Lavi chuckled a little and pushed himself off of the wall. Rather than ducking behind the door like he would have in the past, he moved forward and laid a hand on Kanda's shoulder, then smiled down at the seething expression on the man's face. "No, Yuu-chan. I wanna know what I can do to make you smile." As soon as the words were out of his mouth the face looking up at him was blushing and he winced at it. An awkward laugh caught in his throat. "Was that cheesy?"

Kanda didn't answer. He pretended to be once again interested in the soap bottles.

They were silent for a little, Lavi running his fingers through the long dark strands of Kanda's hair, the Japanese man frowning at the water as if it was filling the tub too quickly. When it was full he shut off the water and stayed where he was for a moment, staring blankly ahead, and waited for some divine clap of thunder to tell him it was time to be naked in the water. The nerves were back again, and every brush of Lavi's hand made them worse. The bathroom itself was not formidable – white walled with a soft wooden cabinet, a round mirror set in a bronze frame, two towel racks and a porcelain latrine and bath – but it seemed rather terrifying with the curious redhead added to the mixture.

All the same, trembling slightly and fearful that this would be the end of him; he stood up and began to fuss with the buckle of his belt.

_Do not get cold feet. You want him. This is just a step in that direction.  
But I wasn't naked last time!  
Not that it matters._

He heard Lavi shirk off his open shirt and jacket and lob them into the pile his own had been left in. The sound of sliding leather told him that the redhead was far more comfortable taking off his clothes this time, more confident. He felt suddenly like he was very new to this. He hadn't bathed naked in a tub with someone else, _ever_ – hot springs and childhood aside – and the thought of doing it now, with Lavi, naked, in a tub, naked, with water, naked—

"You need some help with that?"

"_No!"_ He yanked his belt open and jerked his pants down, leaving him standing very uncertainly in front of the bath in his boxers.

Lavi touched him, just lightly, and he turned to look at the redhead with eyes he knew betrayed how he felt. "If you're having second thoughts," The apprentice Bookman said the words as his fingers trailed a slow line to the elastic of the older man's undergarment, "We can go one at a time and the other one can just sit out here for company."

"No." Kanda shook his head at the idea. "I want…" _To be naked with you._ "The same thing you do. If this is too much then we'll never…"

"Then take _these_ off." Lavi gave a little tug on the fabric he was touching before he let them snap back again, his lips lifted in a dashing little smile. The edges of his teeth showed with it when his fingers came back and pulled suggestively downward, forcing the garment low on Kanda's hips. The Japanese man's face lost a bit of its color as he settled himself and laid his hand on top of Lavi's, pausing his fingers and his underwear from going any lower.

Kanda divested himself rather hurriedly and watched Lavi's gaze traveled in a hurried line from his toes to face, taking him in. Rather than fight the blush on his face he kicked his last discarded garment upward so that it hit the redhead in the shoulder, thus distracting him from his musings. Lavi smiled lopsidedly at him and he found himself wanting to return the expression – they were both naked. In all of his years as an Exorcist he had never felt quite so nude in all of his life. He tried to look without seeming to look. It was different to see the younger Exorcist wearing nothing but his eye patch – different even from what he had seen on the train. Kanda found himself letting his eyes linger at the hollow of Lavi's hips and the turn of his waist, then noted the fact that the apprentice Bookman was taking a moment to appreciate his lower legs and let out a barking laugh. They were acting oddly, both of them, but nothing proved it more than the sound that wrenched itself out of his throat at that moment.

"Should I get you a magnifying glass?" He questioned with a turn of his body toward the tub. He lifted his right foot to step inside only to have a hand touch the center of his stomach and distract him, playing softly on his flesh. His first response was to glare at the redhead, but he couldn't do it with lips suddenly at his temple, innocent in a way that left him staring owlishly at the apprentice Bookman. "What?" It was the second time he was having trouble understanding that unwavering look the younger man was giving him.

"Nothing. I just kinda feel like reciprocating now."

"Try it and I'll castrate you. The water is getting cold."

"M'kay…" Lavi let his hand slide just a little lower, pausing at the top of Kanda's hip. "Don't fall."

"I'm not five, retard." The Japanese man stepped into the water and moved to the side that lacked obstructions, making way for the redhead to follow. There was a strange moment when he wasn't quite sure if sitting would be proper before he decided that it didn't matter, the whole was situation improper, and seated himself regardless of what Lavi did. Almost at once he found himself enjoying the feeling of heat on his skin and hating the brush of wet hair on his back. With a disgruntled sound he twisted his hair into an awkward sort of bun and secured it with his bracelet at the back of his neck, the loose ribbons at the sides of his face avoiding capture. He turned his eyes back to the sideways-lounging redhead and dared him to say something about his chosen hairstyle of the moment.

Lavi just smiled at him again and turned to lean low in the water, smashing his head just beside the faucet and stretching his legs out in Kanda's direction. It didn't take long for an idea to form in the samurai's mind and he turned to the side as well, looking down the length of the tub at the comfortable seeming redhead with something akin to an expression of curiosity on his face. Wordlessly they came to a halt in their maneuvers with their knees touching, poking out of the water like ill placed mountain islands in a sea of hormonal confusion.

Or maybe that was just Kanda's perspective.

"_So,"_ Lavi spoke to the ceiling, wiggling his toes against the bottom of the tub. "You take a lot of baths, Yuu-chan? Versus showers, I mean." It was a meager attempt at conversation, but it was an attempt nonetheless. Kanda shifted a little higher on the wall at it, the better to speak without blocking the redhead from sight.

"No." And he left it at that.

Silence settled once more between the two of them, strange and obtuse and horrifying. Lavi blew bubbles against the surface of the water. Kanda tried not to irritated by it. "Any ideas about the Innocence?" He chimed after a moment. A lack of sound didn't usually bother him that much – not as much as a lack of something to do did – but this was an exception. If they didn't talk, if they didn't have some kind of verbal interaction, he would do something physical and stupid, he knew it, and the cat in the back of his mind wasn't helping. He wanted to get out of the water just because he didn't seem to want to be around water, but at the same time he wanted to be there if it meant touching, kissing, or molesting the Japanese man in it with him. Maybe, if they spoke constantly, he wouldn't pay too much attention to the curve of Kanda's shoulders or the moisture on his neck or the faded bruise on the side of his throat.

"I think it's in that cemetery, but we'll have to talk to more people to find out." Kanda answered honestly, and his left hand fluttered to the side of the bath to pull a bar of soap into the water with him. Lavi didn't think about where his hands had been before that moment and tried not to now. "It's done so much here, I wouldn't be surprised if it has a user – bodies don't dig themselves out of graves without guidance."

"An Exorcist who can reanimate the dead? That's a little dark isn't it?" Lavi's left leg slipped toward the front of the tub as he stretched it up to Kanda's side, as if to take advantage of the length afforded him. It also inevitably brought the calf of his leg into contact with skin. Kanda didn't seem to care.

In fact, Kanda was trying to pay attention to nothing but scrubbing the dirt from his hands. "It doesn't matter if it's dark, an Exorcist with an army of corpses could be damn near unstoppable."

"So are all of the were-people and whatever else is out there… dead people?"

"Che. Maybe."

"Then why do I have ears, too?"

Kanda looked up from his hands and tried not to think about what he could see just below the surface of the water. It didn't work. He thought all about it in the half second it took him to answer. "If it only really works on dead people, maybe all you get is ears and horny cat problems until you die."

"Oh. That's an encouraging thought."

"It would give us more time."

"Well, we don't honestly know if it only works on dead things. And! If it does, what if it _kills me_ when the sixteen days are over? Then I won't just be a freaky cat-man, I'll be a _dead_ freaky cat-man, and I'm sure you don't want to do things with… something like that."

Kanda snorted, a more relaxed expression coming over his face. His right hand, filled with a fair amount of reestablished courage, came into stealthy contact with the skin of Lavi's knee, running up it in slow, reassuring sweeps. "Che. All the more reason to 'do things' with you before then." A smirk spread across his features at the rouge that blossomed across the bridge of Lavi's nose and the little twitch his leg gave. If there was one more sign of encouragement, he might actually do something of questionable intentions.

"Do you want… to put your hands on my soap now?" Lavi asked despite his better judgment. The little lift to Kanda's right eyebrow at it egged him enough to push himself out of the water and slide blushingly over the older man, glad that his legs straightened to allow the move. With his right knee on the porcelain bottom of the bathtub and his left leg draped lazily over the side of Kanda's knee, he placed his hands firmly to either side of the samurai and bent awkwardly to kiss him. The moment it was over – it was a chaste kiss so it all happened rather quickly – a wave of uncertainty filled him and he paused, blinking down at the older Exorcist as if he didn't know what to do with himself.

_Did I do something stupid?_

With a dripping hand Kanda reached out of the water and wiped the dirt from the side of Lavi's face, a little frown tugging at the right side of his mouth. With his hair up and his shoulders low in the water, Lavi had to resist the urge to be stupid again – with his tongue this time. "I told you not to treat me like a woman." The Japanese man said in a voice that wasn't quite as full of contempt as he wanted it to be.

"I'm not. I'm treating you like I wanna kiss you, Yuu-chan."

"By climbing on top of me."

"We're in a bathtub, it's not like I have options."

For a brief moment Kanda managed to scowl up at him before he thought better of it and sighed. His fingers scrubbed a small pink line across the side of Lavi's cheek, then back into his hair, before dropping to get water and continue with the strange task he had assigned it. The redhead just blinked down at him, not seeming to understand his actions. "Che. Whatever." With the hand he had been cleaning at Lavi's face with, he took the redhead by the hair and jerked him down into a long, surprising kiss which the apprentice Bookman did not quite manage to close his eyes to. The Japanese man didn't stop there, either. He let his left hand drift to the narrowing of Lavi's waist and teased it with his fingertips, drawing any number of indiscernible patterns on the skin between there and his hip.

It was only after Lavi had pressed a palm to the right side of his chest that he was granted access to the warm space of the younger man's mouth. He tried to do little things, touch places lightly that he had never felt before, and knew that he had done something right when a sound not too unlike a whine came down at him. He shifted in answer only to become acutely aware of just how disrobed they were when the skin of a thigh brushed every so deliciously across his own.

His teeth closed on flesh none too gently and a growl answered louder than he expected.

"_Mou ii…"_ The expression was out of his mouth without a thought about the meaning or the other man's minimal understanding of the Japanese language. It only mattered that the fingers on the hollow of his hip and moved down and inward, toying experimentally with the tender skin on the inside of his leg. He didn't know if he wanted that. He didn't know if _Lavi_ wanted that. He only knew that the eye looking down at him was so certain he didn't want to tell it no.

"How do you want to do this, Yuu-chan? I've never given a blowjob before but there _is _a first time for everything. Hey, don't look at me with your eyes all wide like that, I wanna…" Lavi pulled his mouth shut and made a strange, deep purring sound as not to meow out his desires. "Fuck you like an animal?" He tried, then shook his head. "No… it's more than that. I want you to…" He let his right arms sink in the water and bend under his weight until he was flush against the dark haired man, his hand curled around his shoulders. Just that little change made him tremble, as did the thought of what warm body part was resting on his leg.

Kanda drew him in closer in an effort to reinitiate their kissing and distract from the intimacy of their position – a position which would have done much better in a bed, really. With his mouth pressed to the cool skin of Lavi's throat, his lifted his pelvis, sloshing a great deal of water and lowering his face almost too far in the process. A hand found the turn of his backside in encouragement and he gave it wholeheartedly, a growl of desire grinding in the back of his throat. This was wholly different than before; he couldn't say he minded the weight on him or the press of curious fingers on his thighs, the bruising force with which Lavi nibbled the skin of his shoulder, the puff of overheated breath against his skin.

But he wanted more than just friction, diluted by water.

"Yuu-chan?" The name was little more than a needy plea his against his jaw. "I'm gonna t-touch… if we can move a – _Gods,_ Yuu! Don't lift your hips like that! I mean – it's good but I'll—" Lavi's ears pressed flat against his head and he returned the motion with enthusiasm that he seemed to lack verbally, a flash of red on his cheeks making his hair clash with his heated face for a moment. The man beneath him pushed him upward and away – the latter direction was not a direction he wanted to go anytime soon – until he found himself sitting in a flustered, dripping heap in front of the samurai, eyebrows pushed together in a pleading expression.

"Sit on the side." Kanda's voice was decidedly huskier than normal, all of his prior worry about his own nudity forgotten.

"Why?"

"Che. You want me to hold my breath?"

Lavi blushed deeper, realizing what the Japanese man intended. His hands, oddly pale from the refraction of the water, moved as if of their own will to Kanda's stomach and tickled a small horizontal line there, experimentally. "But… I wanna… return the favor, you know? I don't want you to put your mouth on me and then decide that I don't get to do anything back."

"_Kuro shitakute ii."_

"English, unless you can say it in Latin."

Kanda ran a wet palm across his bangs that plastered them crookedly against the rest of his hair, out of the way and pointlessly distracting at once. He didn't care however, and assumed the look Lavi gave him had something to do with his heated face rather than his unconventional hairstyle. It wasn't normal for him to blush, let alone to redden to the point he was now. "It's fine. We can't both do it at once, you fi-f-_fucking move_ your hand or I'll… _ah… Lav…_" Kanda's hips rolled of their own will into the hand that slid first across the side of his left thigh and then between his legs, shy and shaking and cold despite the water, yet determined to touch him most intimately. His hands fumbled their way to Lavi's elbows and he held on with enough force to leave bruises – not that he particularly cared if he left bruises – while his mouth missed their mark, colliding wetly with the turn of the redhead's jaw. He cursed lowly, an uncontrollable shiver moved from the very bottom of his toes to the base of his skull.

This hadn't been the plan.

"Sorry Yuu-chan, but I have to make you… I _need_ to return the favor. And I've never given a blowjob and I don't wanna fuck it up the first time and…" He ran his thumb over the top of the Japanese man's erection and swallowed at the press of teeth on his shoulder, the low moan the filled the bathroom with it. "You weren't… born anywhere in Europe, were you?"

"What kind of stupid question is that?"

"Well, it's just… you're _a la natural_…"

"Che. What the fuck does that matter?" Kanda growled into his skin before kissing it softly, negating the anger in his voice. "Didn't notice when you checked me – _ha_ – out before?"

"Nope. I was looking at your legs." Lavi admitted with a sly little grin that Kanda didn't see. Now that his hand was less unsteady he added a second in order to find the place just behind the older Exorcist's manhood and give it a long stroke, he grinned wider at the entirely too pleasant sound the Japanese man made at him in return. He didn't know if he liked this anymore than what had happened before, but he wasn't about to complain about just how powerless Kanda seemed leaning against him. "Which are nice, by the way. Long and muscular and – I am not going to purr no matter how _freakin' _much I want to right now. _Damn_." He breathed, then gasped when the hand on his left elbow moved below the water and graced a slow, jerky line across the inside of his corresponding thigh.

Kanda wasn't about to let Lavi have his way. He slipped his palm against the front of the redhead's erection and smiled at the little flinch it got him. A terrible idea had filled his mind over the past few moments and he decided to put it into action – Lavi was acting far too much out of his control for his liking and he aimed to put a stop to it. With his best coy expression he looked up at the apprentice Bookman and tried not to smirk. "You want… to screw me, don't you? You want me to let you have your way with me?" He questioned in a dangerous whisper.

Lavi swallowed so loudly, the man beside him nearly laughed aloud at his transparency.

"Do you?"

"_Yes_. If you'll let me."

Kanda gave a slow, hard squeeze of his fingers and let his smile show a bit. "Che. You can fucking forget it. Ears or no ears, love or no love; it's my way or no touching."

"So you think… I'm not stubborn enough to tell you no?"

"Exactly."

"You suck."

"I would, if you'd let go of m—" Lavi moved back enough to catch his lover's – if they were lovers – lips with his own and press him backward, ignoring the feeling that if things continued the water would not be fit to bathe in relatively soon. There was no more talking between them for a time, his right hand still moving, left pressed against the cold rim of the tub next to Kanda's shoulders, back curved enough to bring him a bit over the smaller man. The little sounds of protest that the Japanese man managed were lost against his lips until they simply didn't sound anymore, and the left hand that had tried to shove him back to his place pulled him closer. Lavi told himself to be calm at the touch of a tongue on his chest, but that didn't stop the loud moan from leaving his straining throat.

Hunched against the older man, hardly able to keep his hand moving anymore, and blinked down at the strangely emotional eyes that looked so keenly at his torso. For a few seconds he wondered if maybe, with his body so compromised and his gaze so steady, Kanda could secretly want to be vulnerable. It was a theme he had observed over the years that the strong and prideful were uncertain and weak on the inside, but he had never thought to apply it to his best friend anymore than he had thought to apply it to Cross Marian. Yuu was outside of the realm of human understanding. He did what he wanted when he wanted, and nothing would make him do otherwise. There was no deeper meaning to the anger, the glaring, the cheap insults and instance on silence, there was nothing _soft_ or _warm_ about him, nothing that could be mistaken as weakness or kindness. That was his personality in Lavi's eyes, cold and strict and completely unwilling to bend to the world around him.

But it seemed like a stupid assumption to make with his face so tempered with passion.

The thought that the word _love_ or the idea of _infatuation_ might be what drove the man he was more or less straddling made his ears burn with something he didn't understand. He wasn't embarrassed by it – indeed the only embarrassing thing was melting against his best friend and throwing his hips forward in abandon – but he could feel himself reddening nonetheless. Some part of him, long buried as far as he had known, had the power to _hope_ that it was true, and feel _guilty_ for not knowing if he felt it back.

_He said he loved me.  
I wanna…_

A soft warning and a sharp plea seeped passed his lips. The mouth on his left nipple was hotter than the water now, using a gentle suction that promised to leave him tender, and teeth that guaranteed bruises. That coupled with the now hurried, harsh movement of his own pelvis and the fingers wrapped so tightly around his throbbing erection were nearly too much for him; his lover – he had decided that they were lovers now – only looked up at him with a strange sort of determination in his eyes.

"Lavi…I…"

The redhead nodded, running his hands through the samurai's hair without a care to what he left unfinished, snapping the bracelet out of the tangle of tresses and dropping it into the water at once. "I'm sorry that I've been stupid. We can… talk after – I'm gon…"

Kanda tilted his head back to accept the hurried kiss that Lavi offered.

With a final lift of his body Lavi released half into the water and half across the Japanese man's chest, sitting high on his knees. The sound he made was louder this time, chaotic. He slumped forward, reaching to do the same of the dark haired man before exhaustion stole away his focus.

His left ear flicked suddenly to the door just as it started to come open. His teeth closed on the middle of Kanda's tongue.

"_Thuck!"_ The sound of splashing water was drowned out by the slamming of the door and the Japanese man's started curse. Lavi found himself pressed flush with Kanda's chest, his face and shoulder pressed against his soiled skin, the hollow of his hip awkwardly between the smaller man's thighs. There was blood in his mouth, a great deal more on Kanda's chin, and a hurried sound like shuffling outside. The redhead tried to stand but hands caught him by the shoulders and held him in place, perfectly still.

_If I get out… if that's Allen out there… he'll know we were naked and wet together. Yuu-chan yelled so… I can just pretend not to be here._

He could only pray that Kanda knew what he was thinking.

From the other side of the door, a very small, shaky voice sounded, scratchy like sand paper. "Um… er…. K-Kanda are you… in the bathroom again?"

-- -- --

**I feel so very bad for Yuu right now. T.T  
You like? I promise there shall be real smut before the end. No lie!**

**And PLEASE do not kill me for ending it there!!!! (Or Allen.)**


	12. Reasoning and Satisfaction

**I still do not own DGM.**

**And OMG! The reviews are LOVE! You guys roooock!  
**

-- -- --

Part Ten: Reasoning and Satisfaction

At the words – _are you in the bathroom again –_ the dark haired man threw his head back against the tub and growled – it had to be _now_ of all the possible times that Allen could have come back from whatever the fuck he had been doing in the town. If Lavi hadn't been pressed against his chest at that moment, he might have stood up and killed the British boy for being so inconvenient.

"Che! _Go. Away._ I'm bathing._" _It sounded vaguely like he had bit his tongue, or someone else had, though he did a relatively good job of hiding it.

"Right!" Came back the sharp, frightened answer, but no sounds of retreat followed it. Indeed, Allen spoke only a moment after, just as loudly as before. "Ha-have you seen Lavi?"

At once the apprentice Bookman thought about shaking his head, but instead just looked up at Kanda with a perfectly round eye and waited. The cool water seemed suddenly twice as cold.

"Er…"

"_Tell him I went somewhere."_ Lavi suggested in a whisper so quiet it might have been a breath.

"He went… to the poth offithe!" Kanda called after a short, damning pause. Lavi's face turned a shade somewhere between white and green, his hands clamped too tightly on the samurai's skin, trembling like a leaf in the wind. The fact that his '_lover_' had yet to share his pleasure slipped his mind entirely, horror swiftly filling his gut, heavy and uncomfortable. He fought to breathe normally for some reason.

"Um… why would he go without his boots?"

"_The post office? What the Hell are you thinking?!" _The words were little more than a hiss – though Lavi stopped himself sounding like a cat when he did it – and the redhead's ears pushed themselves so close to his skull they almost vanished beneath the strands of his hair. He fought down the sudden urge to push Kanda under the water and hold him there for being such an idiot.

The Japanese man cringed at him, seeming to struggle between answering him and continuing his strange conversation with Allen on the wrong side of the door. "To find out what I was thinking?!"

"Kanda… is someone in there with you?"

The Japanese man moved his head up at that, the better to draw in air, his arms still curled too tightly around Lavi's shoulders. The redhead pushed himself back enough to see the look of sheer terror on the man's face. _"Hell no!"_ Kanda called back at the very top of his lungs.

The apprentice Bookman made a small hurt face at him, just because of the icy tone of his voice. _"If you had said that with more conviction, I'd think you hated the idea."_ He whispered with a deepening of his frown, eyebrows pushed together angrily, lips tugged downward. The hands on his shoulders became a bit looser; Kanda's expression turned apologetic.

"It's not…" He said too loudly, "That I _hate_ the idea—_gaphm!"_ Kanda floundered when Lavi launched himself suddenly forward, burbling as his face went sinking below the line of the water, all of the apprentice Bookman's weight on his shoulders. Thrashing, his brought his hands against Lavi's chest and lifted, only to have the redhead shift into a more comfortable position on top of him.

"Kanda?" The call from just outside the door had a sound in it that warned of curiosity; if there was no answer, Lavi could expect to see the door open any moment.

"It's ok!" The redhead called back unthinkingly. "I'll let him up in a minute!"

A silence so thick the apprentice Bookman might have been able to cut it with a knife filled the space between bathtub and door, heavy with steam and horror and awkwardness. It felt like a small eternity went by for Lavi, looking at the door as if he expected it to leap form its hinges at any moment, hands pressed hard to Kanda's flesh. He held his breath. There was no lying about it when he had gone and done something that idiotic.

"La…vi?"

"_Oops…"_

"Are you… in there with… Ka-Ka-Ka-Ka—"

"Ka?"

"_Kanda?"_

The fingernails digging incessantly at Lavi's chest suddenly felt very painful. "Oh _shit!_ Yuu!" Allen heard the exclamation of the Japanese man's name and decided it would not be the best moment to open the door, though he doubted he would die if he did it now. As Lavi moved aside and hefted the Japanese man's face and shoulders from the tub, he cracked the door open and peeked inside, expecting to find something a thousand time too sexual and a million times too naked to ever describe to Lenalee.

"_You – fucking – moron!"_ The soaking wet Japanese Exorcist spoke between coughs, both of his arms hooked over the side of the tub as he attempted to empty his lungs of water onto the tile floor. Allen watched him draw in air in great gulps, trembling from lack of oxygen, while Lavi looked at him with a worried expression, running a palm slowly over his shoulders. It was a strange thing to see, the two of them sharing that small water filled space, but he could find nothing to say that was mocking or rude to either of them. There was something _wrong_ with the situation – besides nudity and how shaky Kanda was – that he couldn't quite place, something entirely beyond his observatory skills. Kanda took perhaps three minutes to breathe normally, and all the while Lavi whispered hurried apologies at him before he rubbed the side of his face on the samurai's shoulder.

It was only when the dark haired Exorcist looked back at the redhead and narrowed his eyes that Allen began to feel like he had opened the door just a little too far to be comfortable.

"You _stupid…_" Kanda breathed, raising a lip in anger. The apprentice Bookman stared back, though his left ear stayed pointed at the door at a downward angle. A wet hand came out of the water and tangled itself between those feline features, dripping more water into his three-fourths wet hair. "Che." The Japanese man grumbled. "If I didn't love you…" The threat died on his lips and, much to Allen's horror and amusement, Lavi moved forward enough to kiss him lightly on the cheek; eye gently closed to the wide-eyed expression the action got him.

"If you're not going to kill me, Yuu-chan…"

"Hm."

Lavi turned his head slowly toward the door, shaking the water from the tips of his ears. "What can he do to stop you?" His face broke into a smile that stopped Allen from closing the portal and cued the Japanese man to look at it – Allen's face smashed between frame and door.

"Che! I'll _kill—"_

"_Kanda! You're naked! Sit down!"_

"I don't give a damn!"

"My eyes!"

"_I'll fucking cut them out!"_

"Run Allen-chan!" Lavi threw himself at the Japanese man's knees and dragged them both down into the water, dousing his head and most of Kanda's body in the process. Allen stood in the doorway and stared at them, seeming to comprehend that they were indeed naked in a tub together for the first time since he had actually seen it. The apprentice Bookman jerked his head out of the water and shook it violently, cat ears flapping back against his head repeatedly in an effort to get the liquid from inside of them. His hands stayed firmly on the Japanese Exorcist's body, pinning him halfway out of the tub. "What are you waiting for?! Go!"

Allen took a step backward.

"What the Hell are you helping him for?!" Kanda growled at the redhead, prying at his arms with hands that didn't care about the state of Lavi's already pleasantly exhausted muscles. "He ruined what I was doing on the train, reminded us of our stop, and now this? Bullshit. I told you that I'm doing this for _me_, I should _get off_ at some point without this dickwad interrupting!" He landed a hit on Lavi's still slightly swollen left eye and the redhead let go of him to hold his face instead, sliding away to bash his head against the rim of the bathtub.

Lavi spoke as he wound his legs around Kanda's middle to hold him still. "It's not like it's _my _fault or _his_ fault you're…" He paused to think about where they were and who was watching before he decided that it didn't matter – Allen could leave if he heard too much for his supposedly innocent ears. "Incapable of letting me touch you for more than two minutes! If you'd _let me,_ you wouldn't _have_ this problem!" He felt the hands that were suddenly pushing hips away grow suddenly tighter at his words. "I can understand that you don't want to be made into a girl, but it's one thing to say that and another thing entirely to be a jackass about letting me—" The banging of the door on the frame made his head snap to the side; Allen had closed it so hard it had bounced back open again, allowing him to see the flurry of his jacket has he dashed away out of sight. There was no second sound, no other warning that the boy had heard so much to scare him out of the inn all together. Lavi dropped his voice before he went on, hands falling from his face. He uncurled his body enough to look up at Kanda – who was staring down at him with that strange, shocked expression he had come to use more often in the past few days – and smiled. "It's too late now, but tonight, if we have time, I intend to do everything I can to make you… to return…" He stopped when the Japanese man shifted, slightly frightened that he would run after Allen, but found his fears unfounded.

"Che." Kanda reached out and gently pulled the plug of the tub, which left him leaning over Lavi, wet hair enclosing them both in a stringy sort of wet curtain. He swallowed hard, only his eyes narrowed into a scowl. "I told you no."

"What then? If you won't let me touch you then at least let me be there while you do it yourself."

The older Exorcist flushed, his mouth open in a soft, wordless protest for a moment. He bit his lower lip and turned his face away with a grimace. His mind told him that it would mean nothing to Lavi, that his desire was nothing but a blemish in his personality; want for equality rather than fulfillment. "It's not important."

"The Hell it's not!" Lavi growled a little more loudly than he wanted. "You keep this up and you're going to have a case of blue balls so bad, a woman might actually take pity on you. _Please_, Yuu just… after dinner or something, lemme _help_ you. You love me, right? So _give_ me the option of giving _you_ something, ok?" A short gasp parted his lips at the sudden touch of a hand on his head, just behind his left ear, teasing. He tilted into it more out of the desire to feel rather than the desire to give the samurai what he wanted. He accepted the kiss all the same though, hungrily, and sighed out of his nose at the brush of tongue on the inside of his lip – the pastime had improved in quality since that first innocent touch on the bridge that he could remember; his left hand hooked behind Kanda's neck to draw him closer.

The drain gurgled.

With a soft hum the older Exorcist pulled away, snagging his bracelet from the white bottom of the tub as he did, trying to be indifferent. When he had it around his wrist he moved further, batting Lavi's hand from his neck. "Che. I said no."

"Yuu-chan!"

"It doesn't mean anything to you!" Kanda finally stated in a voice that he knew Allen could hear. It didn't matter. Allen could eavesdrop to his heart's content for all he cared. "I _want_ to touch you – as fucking strange as it is for me, I want to hold on to you and smell you and… do _awkward_ things with you! I don't give a damn how male you are or how dumb, I still want to… make you hap-py and see you blush and watch you smile and even though you do it, it's not enough when you do. I don't get anything out of it. It's not satisfying. But making you say my name like that, making you cling to me, and when you look at me like I'm the only thing that matters in the room – you do that just before… you – _that's_ all I need. I'm not mad at anything. I don't give a fuck that you're annoying and stupid and taller than me, it's just…" He shook his head and looked away as if he felt suddenly timid, the wet waves of his hair fell over the sides of his shoulders and he closed his eyes. Lavi felt himself holding his breath and couldn't make himself let it go; it was too much to see Kanda say so much at once and then fall silent as if he didn't know what he was doing. There were too many emotions on that strangely pale face, all of them human. He made to fill the silence with something the, but the Japanese man turned back again, refusing to meet his gaze. "I wouldn't talk this much if I didn't have a reason." He mumbled as if in closing.

Lavi wanted nothing more than to throw himself into Kanda and hold him close. That, though, would be bad in a wet bathtub, naked, and shivering. Instead he swallowed hard and pushed Kanda farther back before he stood, then stepped gingerly onto the tile. He was unsurprised when Kanda followed him out wordlessly, reaching for a towel even before he had wrung out his hair. Lavi found his own and dried his hair in silence before he wrapped it around his waist and waited, trying not to look like he was waiting. He pretended to be mystified by the texture of his covering – white and downy and of much better quality than what the rest of the inn had offered. If he was right the thing was of a new make, and relatively new material.

After a time, Kanda cleared his throat and Lavi glanced in his direction to find him standing with a towel tucked around his hips, another draped lazily over his head, soaking the water from his hair. The redhead did what he had hoped to do before and embraced him regardless of just how stiff the Japanese man turned against his chest.

"Che. I told yo—"

"No." Lavi said into his shoulder, and his hands moved low on Kanda's back, pulling him closer. "You think I don't care about you enough to know what I want, Yuu-chan? It's not like that. Sure, I've got the cat part telling me to bite you on the back of your neck and have at ya, but the rest of me is telling me that… it's like… I don't know." He sighed then and shook his head, anger building in his voice. "But I _want_ to make you feel good. It… means that I… please you…because I guess and… you're pretty hard to please…" As he went on his voice grew progressively quieter, until it was just a whisper of sound against Kanda's skin, his arms an anchor to keep him from falling away with a blush. He cleared his throat loudly. "So, if I can find a time when the sprout isn't gonna find us… will you lemme do something for you, Yuu?" Just as the question came from his lips a hand curled experimentally against his back. It seemed to him that Kanda was fine with any contact he initiated, but touching that had not been his idea was entirely removed from his understanding – he had no set way to react. So, with a little lift of his lips, Lavi let him run his fingers up the center of his back and relax.

With a blush that he could only hope the redhead didn't see, Kanda nodded. "If he finds us, I'll fucking kill him."

"Oh, I know." Lavi chuckled. "I know."

-- -- --

It seemed to Lavi that as much as Kanda loved him, Allen wanted him to die. Not only did the British boy manage to more or less shrug off the whole event as some kind of naked-male-bonding, he also did so while adding a rather troublesome G to Kanda's name. He asked them awkward questions – how things started, how long had they known each other, had Kanda tried to hack Lavi to pieces the moment they had met (which, ironically, was how it had happened) – as well as random things about the mechanics of their relationship. Did Kanda care that Lavi was taller? Did Lavi like Kanda's hair? Did it make for good reigns? Did Lavi find himself threatened less often now that they had shared space naked?

And of course, the more Allen asked the closer Kanda got to skinning them both alive. It wasn't as if Lavi was giving more answers than he needed to, it was just that Kanda didn't like people knowing anything about him besides the fact that he liked Japanese food – and at the rate Allen was going, he was going to know plenty more. At least if he hadn't been in the room with them, sitting on the bed next to the redhead, he wouldn't have had to know that Allen knew.

He fought down the urge to run.

Lavi noted absently that the Japanese man wasn't helping much with conversation, his eyes focused out the window thoughtfully, orange and blue light reflecting silver from the line of his bangs. The sun had more or less set, sitting on the edge of the town like a great red dewdrop, rolling slowly to fall off of the horizon. The snow clouds were dyed a bruised purple against the yellow sky, lacking any sort of lining. Kanda didn't seem to be looking at any of that, however, he seemed to be focused on something much farther away, something that maybe only his dark blue eyes could focus on, way off past the sunset. His fingers tugged the red fringe of his coat tighter.

_I bet he's thinking about the Innocence again._ Lavi thought with a little lift to his lips. _Workaholic._

He was wrong.

_Che, I don't want him to do anything he might regret. _Kanda's mind was saying at that moment, tuning out Allen's fifteenth question of the hour. He wasn't going to answer anyway, it wasn't his job. _The only way to avoid it is to keep Moyashi around – I don't want him around. I'll fucking kill someone. Shit._

"Right?" The British Exorcist was saying with an enthusiastic cock of his head. Kanda's head snapped to look at him with a customary scowl but caught a glimpse of Lavi on the way and paused, taken aback by the smile he had plastered so surely across his face. The apprentice Bookman nodded, and the red strands of his hair hung down over his eye patch with the motion, seemingly unnoticed despite its brightness. Kanda observed suddenly that the younger man hadn't been wearing his headband at all since the ears had sprouted and took a moment wonder why – swiftly his mind decided that it didn't matter _why_ he wasn't wearing it, only that he looked better without it. Unthinkingly he lifted his hand as if to touch the side of Lavi's face and brush at his hair, then thought better of it and let his hand fall back to the mattress, fisting in the covers. It was one thing to show his desires – his weakness – to Lavi, and another show it in front of Allen. The fact that he had even come close to doing it warned him just how bad he had it.

He clenched his jaw and wrenched his eyes away from Lavi. It was Allen who was being annoying, so he would just glare at him.

"Exactly." Lavi was nodding agreeably, though his left hand was tangled more tightly in the bedding than Kanda's was. "There are some things that don't mesh well, and I don't know how things are gonna go over with Bookman, and I know that if things keep up we'll have to keep things hush-hush around Two-Spot and Eyebrows but…" His pause was uncertain, all of his good acting skills going out the door in that instant, a strange emotion taking his features. Kanda recognized the slip in his composure and stealthily let his right hand brush against the redhead's left, a subtle touch that he hoped Allen missed. Lavi didn't; he smiled softly at it. The samurai never reassured anyone of anything, ever, they both knew. "I think things will work out as long as I live through this."

"Che. We'll find the Innocence before that happens."

"I meant you, Yuu-chan."

Allen snorted, cutting off Kanda's protest. "I doubt he'll kill you Lavi, God knows he won't get anyone else to sleep with him."

Lavi only just managed to pin Kanda against the mattress, Mugen's length stretched out over his shoulder in Allen's direction. To his surprise the Japanese man didn't try to hack through him to get to the white haired Exorcist; he held his arm out pointedly, a dark look on his face.

"No! Bad Yuu-chan! Down!"

"_Che. I'll fucking cut your face o—"_

Lavi did the only thing he could think to defuse the situation: he took Kanda by the shoulders and kissed him on the mouth, pressing him back against the pillows when he tilted away in surprise. The little gasp that parted the older man's lips invited him into his mouth, no longer bloody, and he slipped his tongue against the inside of Kanda's cheek. Both Kanda and Allen made sounds of discontent, the samurai's eyes open wide in shock, Mugen forgotten in his hand. The British boy actually stood up, gaping at the two of them.

"You know… like that… you kind of make a good couple. Like a lion and a lion tamer." Allen chimed with a little giggle.

It took perhaps five seconds for Kanda to decide Allen wasn't worth it and change his hold on his katana, angling it so he could bring his hand against Lavi's shoulders without stabbing him in the back with it. The redhead seemed to notice the blade lying straight down his back and moved closer, perhaps to distance himself from the weapon or to get closer to the other man, but definitely not to quell the catlike desire to curl into a ball around his significant other. The purr in the back of his throat had nothing to do with that either, nor the sudden desire to sink his fingernails into the man beneath him and hold him down – to make touching easier, somehow.

_I wonder if this is what it feels like to lose your mind._

Kanda pushed him back after a time, though his right hand remained on the redhead's back and he stayed as he had fallen, right leg on the mattress between them, left palm pressed to Lavi's waist. With a cocked eyebrow and a tiny lift to the side of his mouth he looked at Allen, whom stared down at them with something of akin to horror written on his face. The older man had to fight not to smile wider, basking in the boy's obvious discomfort. "I bet you're just jealous you aren't getting any. Not that a twelve year old should, _brat._" Kanda growled a little more lowly than he did when he threatened people, just to make the white haired bean listen. He could push buttons back if he wanted. "How'd you spend your _investigation_ time? Eating cake and getting lost like child, Moyashi?"

"Shut up." Allen bit out a little more vehemently than he usually did, lifting a hand to starch at the back of his head as if it soothed him. "I only got lost once, but I still learned more than you did in your stupid, hormone blinded state."

"Che. I am not hormone blinded."

"Oh, sorry, did I say _hormone?_ I meant _homo._"

"_Moya—"_

"And you've made progress, Gaynda. I never imagined you'd have sex and admit to being stupid, let alone do both in the same day. I thought you were going to die an old maid, all virginal and pure and wrinkly. I had money on it."

"Er…" Lavi broke in before Kanda could say whatever foul, inexplicably violent and inappropriate thing he seemed to be preparing to produce. Though Allen's taunting had not incited their usual physical reaction, the older Exorcist had taken in a short breath as if to say something more loudly – and knowing him it would have to do with Allen looking like an old man regardless of his supposed prepubescence. The apprentice Bookman did not want to be on top of him when the argument came to blows. "We actually um… have yet to have sex with each other, Allen-chan."

"What do you mean _yet_?" The Japanese man turned to him with a scowl that Lavi couldn't read – one that could have meant he wanted to have done it already or was never planning to. The redhead felt his blood run cold.

"Eh… eh heh… heh… I mean…"

"If you want me to step outside so you can—" Allen took a step away from the bed with the words, before found Lavi unceremonious pushed to the floor beside him, Kanda making a sound that was half a curse and half something else all together.

The samurai stood and sheathed his sword, ignoring the two young males who watched him flip his hair and walk stubbornly away with his eyes narrowed, seeming – for all intents and purposes – normal. He glanced down at them both, irritation flashing darkly in his eyes. "I'm going to look at that graveyard. You two can sit here and make sex jokes, I don't care." The fabric of his coat ruffled as he turned away, boots making harsh sounds against the wooden floor. He wouldn't have stopped for anything but the pair of arms that somehow twined themselves around his elbows and waist, drawing him to a quick halt.

"It's supposed to be dangerous out there. I don't want you to…" Lavi's voice said from behind him, the words a hot flicker of breath in his ear. He could feel the younger man's chest pressed flush against his back and shivered, warmth running the length of his body, fire lighting in his veins. He had been naked next to that body. He had touched all sorts of places on it. He had tasted most of what it had to offer. But now, with his arms restrained and body heat seeping through the back of his coat, he didn't think he had done enough. "It's basically dark outside, so take me with you." The redhead finished softly into his ear, breathing out a little more harshly than was absolutely necessary. With all of that and the memory of the bathtub fresh in his mind, Kanda fought down the urge to just throw the redhead down and fix all of his problems in one single go.

"Che." His voice was too small. "You shouldn't. We'll both be worse off in that place."

"What'd ya mean?"

"You don't like it there and I… will be distracted by you." Kanda tried to clarify. The arms around him stiffened a little until a hand found his and closed around it, a dark chuckle lifting over his shoulder with it. A cold, unfamiliar feeling settled in the pit of his stomach at it, a sort of emotion that warned of danger to come. "Baka Koneko, what are yo—"

"Ne – Allen-chan, will you stay here until we get back? It'll only take a minute." Lavi was steering them toward the door before Allen could answer or Kanda could protest. The Japanese man gave up fighting him after a moment, thinking that he must want to escape Allen's presence while he said whatever it was that needed to be said. To his surprise however, they passed into the hall and then down the stairs, at which point Lavi tugged his hood over his ears before pushing them out of the front door without even glance at the inn's evening crowd. The town was dead outside, the last faded golden rays of the sun fanned across the horizon like pleats of fabric, and bounced bronze from the threatening snow clouds overhead, not a bird or a kite or a ball obstructing the evening sky. The redhead pushed him to the right without even glancing at the contrast of metallic clouds and honey sunset, guiding them none-too-gently into the nearest – _dark_ – alleyway.

Kanda had had enough at the same moment Lavi let go and took him by the shoulders. He made to call the redhead an entirely litany of vulgarities, starting with _asshole_ and ending somewhere around _whore_ before he questioned him about why they were standing in the dankest coldest corner of a dangerous town. However, before he could get the words out of his mouth he found himself spun rather unceremoniously against a brick wall, the larger man's hands pressed to his shoulders.

Every curse word morphed into a single interrogative in his mind: _what?_

Without the word escaping his mouth, Lavi swallowed as if prepared to answer. Kanda felt the hands on his shoulders slide to the center of his chest and stay there more softly, cold and lacking their customary fingerless gloves, unsteady enough to will him to touch them. He wouldn't. He was glaring at the redhead for being a stupid, irritating individual, not protecting him from the cold of the growing pre-winter night.

But _God_, he wanted to.

"Yuu-chan, we've got maybe eleven minutes and… nine seconds before the sun goes down, and before that happens…" Lavi whispered in a rush, and glanced over his shoulder rather exaggeratedly to see passed the material of his hood, then turned back again just as hurriedly. One of his ears twitched at such an odd angle it made his cover sit funny on his head. "We're gonna get some things straight. Ok?" Under the shadows his eye flicked back and forth between Kanda's, never focusing for more than a moment. "First, I can hear the church from here, and no one's around that can hear us. Second, receiving – if we ever _get_ that far – doesn't make you feminine; it just means you have that sort of preference. Third, this crap about me distracting you needs to stop _right now._ In fact, I am going to put a stop to it and you're going to stand here and be nice and quiet while I do."

Kanda blinked at the redhead for a moment, unable to hide the owlish quality to his expression. "Who are you and where's Lavi?"

The apprentice Bookman shook his head, his expression one of serious discontent. "Look at this from my side, Yuu-chan. You're a Gemini; you should be able to do that no matter how much you don't like the idea." He sighed, hands falling lower on the Japanese man's body. They paused, frozen, at just the turn of his hips. "Let's say I did some naughty things to you on a train ride but won't let you touch me back, later – when you try to touch me – I tell you not to treat me like a submissive. And, even though you're not allowed to touch me and I'm obviously losing focus from not letting you do it, I claim to love you. What are you gonna do, Yuu? Let me keep doing what I'm doing for a half a month before I say _'ok, I'll take you up the ass now?'_" He pulled the older man forward purposely and slipped his left leg into a rather intimate place. To his surprise, however, the hands that came to his coat front did not immediately cast him away. "You _know _that you wouldn't. You'd wanna do exactly what I wanna do, if not everything you've already done."

The Japanese Exorcist fisted his hands in the redhead's clothes and bit his lower lip as he scanned the front of the alleyway. Not only did he not want to do anything like what Lavi was insinuating, he also did not want to do anything Lavi was insinuating _here_, of all dirty, dark, unfriendly places. That didn't stop his back from arching away from the wall at an overly confident hand that had somehow worked its way beneath the fabric of his jacket. His jaw was hanging loose and he snapped it shut; his fingernails made short catching sounds as they scratched at the redhead's coat. "What the fuck are you doing? And… that last sentence, with the do's…" A click filled his ears despite the fact that it was nearly nonexistent, the sound of his belt coming undone. Every physical reaction he could think of was _wrong_ in this instance, but for the nonthreatening tightening of his grip and a slow movement of his hips against Lavi's leg, both of which left him feeling rather pathetic and weak in the knees. It was too easy for the redhead to do this to him, too easy for all of his defenses and logic to just melt away without pause. More than anything he wanted to curse, but the second touch of a hand palming his clothed manhood made him gasp instead. His eyes squeezed themselves shut.

"My hands are cold." Lavi said in a quiet voice, suddenly just next to his ear. He didn't remember leaning into the wall and he didn't remember yanking the younger man against him, but he had somehow managed to do both. He opened his eyes to find the periwinkle and puce sky fading swiftly to black, though not even a star had pierced the velvet of the heavens. A chill hand made quick work of his pants buttons before he felt a rush of cold air on his surprisingly hot flesh, though not cool enough to threaten his state of arousal. "Nine minutes. I guess that's seven minutes in heaven and two to fuck it up. _Ny—_I mean… your coat…" He started pulling at buttons halfway down Kanda's chest and the samurai took the initiative. With a speed he wouldn't have thought possible he helped the redhead open the bottom half of his jacket and push it open, at which point he began to wonder what the purpose of the action was. He wasn't let to ponder for long however, when Lavi laid a short kiss on his lips and then slowly, shyly, sank to his knees.

It wasn't until he couldn't hold on to the redhead's chest anymore that he realized what exactly was happening to him. His self proclaimed best friend was about to do something he had never done before – with his mouth of all possible body parts. "Ch-cho…" _English._ "Wait, Lavi. This really isn't…"

"Just put your hands in my hair, Yuu-chan. It'll be fine."

"If someone comes—"

"You'll come. That's the idea. If anyone _else_ comes, I'll hear them."

"Che. You're _so _not Japanese…"

"Huh?"

Kanda stiffened at the touch of very cold fingers on his manhood, cupping his heated flesh delicately while Lavi moved his boxers out of the way and wiggled his pants lower. He swallowed thickly and shoved his fingers into Lavi's hood, just because it gave him something to hold onto. He was blushing and he knew it, but thinking – which he usually tried to avoid – made it easier to handle. "Culturally…" He growled out. "It's more comfortable to be… vague. Saying it like that…"

"It's true though. I want to make you come, Yuu-chan."

"_Urusei na."_

"Shut up?"

All Kanda could do was close his eyes and nod, all too aware of the play of too-hot breath on his skin, contrasting with those icy fingers. The back of his head connected with the brick behind him at the slow, experimental brush of fingers folding back the foreskin of his erection, trembling, and sucked in a deep breath of air at the slick tongue that touched it only a moment later. It wasn't like a hand at all. It wasn't like anything he had ever felt. It was warm and wet and, when the redhead moved his mouth over the head in curiosity, entirely too much for him. Kanda couldn't fight down the strangled moan that filled his throat or still the sudden rock of his hips, it was all just what he felt he needed to do, it was all perfect, and he wanted more of it.

Lavi watched the samurai blush at his touch and analyzed his responses, trying to pick out what he thought the Japanese man liked and what might drive him mad with yearning. It didn't occur to him that what he was doing should not have happened anywhere outside where prying eyes might see, he was too distracted by the fisting of hands in his hair and the subtle lift of Kanda's pelvis. Did the older man know his mouth was open like that? Did he feel moisture burning behind his eyes? Did he mean to make that little whine of enjoyment at the flick of tongue against the slit at the tip of his erection? The apprentice Bookman couldn't answer those questions, couldn't even envision their answers, but he could see the unfettered enjoyment on Kanda's face and moved his hands to pin the man's slim hips against the wall while he moved his mouth lower.

"_Ha…Ra… fuck…"_ The sounds came when Lavi felt that he couldn't take anymore and simply held still, trying to convince his throat that it wanted to take the last few centimeters of flesh despite his gag reflex. It didn't work, however, and he retched awkwardly around the flesh in his mouth before he pulled back a bit, breathing harshly out of his nostrils. Kanda looked down at him with his eyes just hardly open and panted, great plums of moisture escaping his lips and cold tinted nose, almost glowing in the fading light. "Don't… over do it, _baka._" He growled at the redhead, and his fingers wandered just behind Lavi's ears.

_Oh…_ Lavi would have said the word aloud but couldn't in his current position, so instead he let out a low, throaty, vibrating moan that made the older man throw back his head again with a whine. It was rather difficult to watch the reaction and keep the samurai's bucking hips to the wall, but the redhead managed; he sucked softly, lapping in a slow, predictable rhythm. That, however, didn't seem to be enough to end everything in just a few short minutes, so he tried something else. He swallowed.

Kanda's knees buckled. _"Baka Koneko… yamerou…"_

"_Hmmm?"_

"Che. Don't fucking tease me, _boke_." The Japanese man responded with a lowering of his head. Lavi met his gaze, not even the slightest bit embarrassed, and idiotically tried to nod. The bobbing motion sent a thrill of pleasure dancing into the base of Kanda's spine and he fought to roll his pelvis at it, eager to feel it again, but Lavi's hands kept him standing firmly in place. The redhead seemed to get the message as he began to move his head first back and up and then down and forward, pressing hard with his tongue and only occasionally accidentally scraping with his teeth. The Japanese man's eyes slid shut, back arched from the wall, and he let out a soft, pleading curse, his hands tugging on Lavi's hair in time with his movements, stroking his ears accidentally. For once he didn't care that he wasn't in control of the situation, only that the warmth and pressure and the touch of tongue on skin was too much for him, especially after a long day of living in denial.

Lavi growled low in his throat and increased his pace. Kanda hated the moan that escaped his lips and lingered in the growing darkness, evidence to his vulnerability. It took all of his will to force words to form in his head and make their way out of his mouth. _"Rabi…_" His accent hadn't been that heavy in years and he knew it. _"I'm… Rabi—"_

The apprentice Bookman just looked up at him and cocked an eyebrow before he redoubled his efforts. Like he wanted it, like he was _enjoying_ himself.

Just the thought sent a spiral of heat to the base of Kanda's arousal and that, coupled with the redhead's ministrations, sent him over the edge. He clamped his fingers on the hair in his hands at the same moment that the redhead jerked away in surprise, a muffled sound of shock escaping his lips. To his horror he released mostly across his best friend's lips and up the right side of his face, catching both his eye patch and the edge of his forelock, only the first few drops anywhere that wouldn't be seen. His knees felt like soba noodles in that moment, limp and distant and tingly, but he tried to pretend like it was concern for Lavi's face that brought him to the ground beside him, fingers reaching to smear away the mess if he could.

"Shit, Yuu! How the hell do you swallow this stuff?" The redhead gagged openly at him as soon as he had wiped his mouth clean enough to speak. "It's like trying to drink a fucking salt flat." He went on, scrubbing away at his face with the back of his hand.

"Che. I didn't think about the flavor."

"Sure. Right. Of course you didn't. Ugh… I need water."

"Wait a second; you've got some on your eye and in your hair."

"Gees, you're a real man Yuu, I thought you'd only got my mouth."

"Shut up and stop moving away."

"Stick your junk in your pants before it freezes off."

"Listen smartass, I'm trying to clean you."

"No, it's fine, I'll do it myself where no one can see me take it off my eye patch."

Kanda hastily did as he was told before he grabbed the redhead by his upper arms and jerked him closer. Lavi made a tiny sound of discontent but didn't try anything violent, choosing instead to look up at his… friend gone lover with his eye as round and glassy as the moon, almost blue silver in the starlight. "Che." It wasn't the irritated sound it usually was, instead it was louder, angrier, and somehow it conveyed a feeling of delicateness it usually lacked. "Just… let me…" The Japanese man lifted his left hand and wiped his seed from the fringe of the redhead's bangs, watching the younger man watch him with a round, thoughtful eye and his hands tangled in his shirt. A short protest escaped Lavi's lips when he touched the material of his eye patch and he stopped, furrowing his brow. "Since when are you this bitchy and defensive anyway?" He asked without moving.

"Well, for one you didn't exactly _warn_ me that you were gonna try to sperm-blast my teeth clean, Yuu-chan."

"Lavi…"

"Besides, I don't really have an eye on that side. It's gross. I don't want you seeing that if you don't have to." The redhead explained more softly. Kanda stayed exactly how he was however, with his fingers resting on the material without moving, the knees of his pants soaking up the moisture on the cobblestones. "So… wipe it off a little and we'll go up and I can scrub it in the sink in the bathroom."

Kanda frowned at him and swept his thumb across the black fabric, taking most of the stain with the motion. "Che. How'd it happen?" As he asked the question he pushed himself up, wobbling, and dragged Lavi up beside him. In the semidarkness he realized that the redhead's hood had fallen off so that his ears flicked about in the night air, moving back and forth at sounds that Kanda couldn't hear. The chirp of the last cricket, the distant bang of a door closing – those ears heard it all. With tenderness he had only begun to show recently, he stroked the one nearest to his right hand until it flattened itself away from him and Lavi made a face that warned of company. He dropped his hand and stepped back a bit. No one would suspect them of anything sexual, he didn't think, but he'd rather avoid it any way possible.

Lavi tugged his hood up and grinned down a little at him, fingering the head of his hammer. "They're a ways off, whoever they are. We've got time."

Kanda nodded.

"I was hit by a stray bullet when I was seven." He went on conversationally, "Gramps thought I was a goner from all the bleeding and the fact that it was my _head_ – of all places – but I lived. I was too little to get a prosthetic and they always look funny, you know? They sorta drift? Anyway, I figured I'd have more luck just hiding the hole in my face rather than trying to fill it with something that might pop out when I sneeze and stuff." He ended the story with a lopsided, cookie-cutter smile. It was the exact sort that Kanda had seen him use on women, the one that he always showed Lenalee when she was down, the one that he reserved for nothing and wore every Goddamn morning at breakfast. Kanda knew that he didn't feel it and scowled deeply, a sort of twisted feeling of betrayal filling his gut.

"Thanks for sharing. Now shu—"

"Shut up, yeah, yeah I kn—" Lavi stopped short, left lump of an ear turned toward the end of the alley, and blinked. He looked up at the partly cloudy night sky for a split second before he turned back to Kanda and paled, taking his hammer in one hand and Kanda's wrist in the other.

"What?" The question was the only sound on the street. Not a cricket's call or a door's knock or a carriage's creak reached the samurai's ears. It dawned on him. "It's… dark."

"Uh huh…"

"_Kanda!"_ The voice was not from Lavi's lips but rather from the end of the alley, higher and quieter, weak and light and hollow sounding. No body accompanied it, but it made the Japanese man stiffen and frown deeper nonetheless. _"Lavi?! Kanda?! It's sundown!"_

-- -- --

**You like? :3**


	13. Confrontation and Disturbance

**MY BETA IS ON HIATUS FOR EXAMS. SO YOU GET THE TYPO-FILLED VERSION UNTIL SOMEONE –cough-sailor?-cough- TELLS ME THE TYPOS THAT I MISSED.**

**And, on a different note, there is much plot development this time. And NO fanservice. That's right. I wrote a whole chapter with nothing but little touches of lips to cheeks and handholding. Why? Because I figured it was time to give you guys some meat to chew on, heh heh heh.**

**Feel free to make plot conjectures. I like to see what you think will happen! 8D**

**I still do not own D. Gray – Man. If I did, the action scenes would not only be very, very lame, they would also include lots of jackets and shirts being blown to little ashy bits. :3**

**WARNINGS: Badly written action! A lack of naked! Mild shounen-ai! And Kanda acting strangely due to… things.**

**-- -- --**

Part Twelve: Confrontation and Disturbance

In the darkness the cobblestones were just a shade off from charcoal, glimmering wetly in the light of the waxing moon, silver and gray and nearly black in the shadows. Allen picked his footing cautiously, bright eyes drawn into observant circles as he moved down the street with his right hand on his left glove, the hairs on the back of his neck lifted in anticipation, his coat thrown back behind him in the newly raised wind. He shivered. Not only was he somewhat lost now that he wasn't in the inn, he also felt that calling out to his companions had alerted every sinister ear for a mile of his existence, and therefore invited them all to come feast on his flesh in the starlight. Sure, it was likely that just thinking about it was creeping him out some, but that didn't soothe away the prickles of fear in his gut.

"_Lavi?! Kanda?! Hellooooo?!" _The sound of his own voice gave him the courage to walk passed a rather dark and treacherous looking alleyway without having a small heart attack. This was unlike him. He normally took pride in his unflappability – Crowley's castle aside, of course.

_Where could they have gone?_

"Excuse me but… are you lost?" The question was spoken from behind him by a person he had not seen or heard before it was voiced. He gave his glove a little tug without taking it off as he turned, expecting his eye to whirl to life or a bullet to tear into his chest. Neither happened. A cloaked, short figure stood slightly more to the side of the street, a small, round face looking up at him expectantly. For a moment he couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman questioning him, but he quickly decided that it didn't matter – there were questions he could ask without knowing.

"Um… I'm not so much lost as I can't find my colleagues." He half lied. It was safer, he thought, than rattling off a thousand and two questions about undead things and bats and werewolves and vampires. "I'm also looking for information on what's happening in this town, actually." He added more softly.

The figure smiled at him, though he could not see its eyes to know if the expression was genuine. "Well, I don't know who your friends are, but if you know anything about what's going on here, then you know it's not smart to be out at night." The person responded with a clear, crisp voice. A hand came out from the folds of that black fabric and waved at him, long feminine fingernails moving almost too quickly for him to notice. "Though it is less dangerous than some of the folk would have you believe; I doubt that someone like _you_ will have any trouble."

Allen frowned at the woman, not truly understanding if she was warning him or telling him he was safe. He shifted on his feet for a moment. "Then… what do you know about what's going on in town? I heard from the others that there are zombies and vampires and werewolves and all sorts of things around here just waiting to eat people or turn them. Is it true?" When the question was out of his mouth the woman's smile faltered a bit, sagging at the edges, and she looked behind her, as if expecting something violent in that moment.

"It's true, for the most part. The dead are walking; the living feed on each other." She shrugged, "But not everyone who is bitten turns, you know, and not everyone that turns becomes the same thing as what bit them. It all seems rather random to me." With her visible hand she pointed down the way, east, and took a step, inviting Allen to join her. He did after a moment, figuring it was better to get more information and walk her to her destination than it was to let her go and risk her being caught up in a maelstrom of violence if she was found. They traveled side by side for a moment until she went on. "I have to be out at night, so I made a habit of memorizing where the turned ones move – we should go this way unless you want one to find you on your way back. After sundown they fan out, street by street by street, until there's almost one for every corner, and then they wander about, back and forth, like they're looking for something. There's one that doesn't do that, though. And they'll go wild if they catch sight of something, but for the most part, that's the way things are." She turned them down a street away from the inn and he went after her, trying to remember where it was that they were going and how he would have to turn to get back. It was pointless to try really. Allen couldn't save himself from getting lost anymore than this woman could save herself from an akuma given the opportunity.

He cleared his throat as they went on into the darker, slummier side of town, unconsciously showing his discomfort. "Where do they fan out from?" He rasped. He hadn't been this nervous a few moments ago, but there was something about everything here that made him want to shiver with fright. Breathing deeply didn't seem to be helping, either.

"The graveyard." She answered baldly.

"When did it start?"

"Hm… maybe a few months back. After Lady Rothchild died, I'm sure."

"Who?" He inquired at once. Dead people, he knew, were buried – and if this Lady Rothchild had been buried with Innocence on her person, they'd need only find her grave and defile it to get the Innocence. Defiling a grave however, wasn't something they could do and be wrong about. So he would prod.

They turned right.

"Lady Eva Rothchild. She was an old crotchety women before she turned over, lived in the big dark house to the north of town that looks down on everything." The woman explained. By now Allen realized that he wasn't getting back to the inn without directions and stopped paying attention – he couldn't think which way was north from here. "Pretty much everyone is glad she died, sadly enough. I'm new in town – you can probably tell by how I talk – so I don't know what made her so horrible, but… apparently she was. Anyway, my house is just up the block so I guess this is goodbye… um…"

"Allen."

"Oh. I'm Gregory."

"Gregor—eh?!" Allen found himself saying. But rather than going on about how he had thought this man was a woman and the poor guy most likely had more problems than Kanda did being so short, he bowed his head and smiled; Gregory stopped walking and stood in front of him, returning the gesture slightly. "Well, thank you very much for your time, I'll be… trying to find my inn again, I suppose." Allen chimed with an all too enthusiastic smile before he turned away, walking briskly in the direction he had hoped they had come from. He could feel Gregory's eyes on his back as he went, perhaps trying to figure what his purpose was here, and did his best to walk confidently. Even if he had asked for directions, they wouldn't have helped.

-- -- --

The shine of black steel in evening light was the only real warning Lavi had besides the sound of unnatural wind whipping the fur of his ears. It seemed that the moment Kanda had noticed the falling of night something changed in the air, something dark and sinister had joined them with the wind, forcing a knot of anticipation to form in his gut. A small flood of reassurance settled in his chest, however, at the subtle brush of the Japanese man's shoulder against his back. He hefted his hammer a little higher and let it grow a bit in size, then rested it lightly across his arm, waiting for what would come next.

For a long moment the only sound he could define was Kanda's breathing matched with his own.

"Che." The sound might have been a curse for all the venom in it. "If there's some fucking akuma…" He tapered off, every muscle in his back rigid against the redhead's, eyes focused on a shadow that, when he looked at the moonlight and the lay of it across the ground, had no logical right to be there. It was shaped a bit like a barrel, or a hunched over child, and it _bothered_ him somehow. He narrowed his eyes at it, expecting it to move.

"Wha—"

"_Are you looking at me?"_ The voice didn't seem to be in the alleyway so much as right beside Kanda – he tightened his grip on Mugen's hilt but remained still; a bead of sweat that had nothing to do with the temperature trickled down the side of his neck. _"You're very pretty for a boy, aren't you? Your hips could be mistaken for a woman's I'm sure…"_ A chuckle sounded softly in his right ear and his eyes grew wide – the shadow was missing and he couldn't find it, the thing had just disappeared right from under his eyes as if by magic, tugged away into the thicker shadows. A ball of icy fear settled in his stomach and he turned his eyes slowly to the right.

"Did you hear me?"

"_What a pity you're so pretty…"_

"Yuu-chan?" His name made him jump at the same moment something he couldn't see as anything more than a slightly darker spot in his vision _moved_ into him, fast and hard. It didn't matter that he had Mugen raised to stop the thing – it flowed under his guard and slammed headlong into his ribcage, driving the air from his lungs with more than enough force to leave a bruise. He was flung down the bystreet like a rock thrown without reason. A lightning bolt of pain seared across his back at the brick wall at the end of the alley connecting with his shoulders, the tips of his fingers and the bottoms of his feet lost feeling for a moment and the world tilted, overcome with a wash of threatening darkness and a cloud of powered stone. Gasping, the samurai crumpled onto his right side in the rubble, unable to see or move for a time, but still fighting to orient himself and see if Lavi had suffered the same seemingly impossible impact.

The redhead was being held off of his feet, three meters between the head of his hammer on the ground and the shaft of it in his unprotected right hand. He wasn't bloody or wounded looking, but his eye was wide with a terrible expression of shock, a shadow that shouldn't have been there somehow wrapped around the sides of his face and pressed against his chest. His fingers were white knuckled, every muscle in his body tense. And yet, despite the apprentice Bookman being drawn like a bow string against the side of the building, he didn't seem capable of moving.

With a growl Kanda righted himself, annoyed at the topsy-turvy way the world tilted for a moment and how his left knee shook, and aimed as best as he could for that little bump of shadow.

"_Kaichuu…_" He was out of breath and the word came out a growl, raspy and dark and filled with a half a wheeze._ "Ichigen!"_ The attack sent a rush of tingling energy up his arms and across his chest, a little flurry of power and excitement that always, no matter how beaten or numb he was, reminded him just how _alive_ he had to be. Hell's Insects moved like the demons they were, swift and determined, following his will to attack that dark thing holding Lavi in place. They struck something and a shriek filled his ears, high and long and keening, though not like any sound he had heard an akuma produce in all of his time as an Exorcist. Lavi fell from his place on the wall, his entire body limp for a moment against the cobblestones, his chest moving in rapid, thirsty gasps. While the redhead fought to bring himself to his hands and knees, Kanda moved closer, eyes darting from place to place in search of some sign of attack.

For a long, quiet moment, nothing came. The apprentice Bookman hauled himself upward, leaning on his hammer until he could move it out before him.

"What the fuck was that?"

"How the hell should I know?"

The exchange was done in hissing whispers, Lavi's question just a bit louder than the one he was answering, and Kanda took a moment to glare at him for it. The redhead took his left hand from his hammer to rub at his neck for a moment, then wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and spat, shivering slightly. The man beside him raised an eyebrow, but didn't let the reaction bother him no matter how much he wanted to.

Two minutes passed, neither of them making a sound. When it came this time, the thing was angry.

And loud.

"_You irritating wanker!"_ The words were blasted so loudly at them, Lavi worried that his ears would never function properly again. To his surprise it came for Kanda this time, ripping Mugen from his grasp and smashing him against the nearest wall with enough force to crack it. The samurai's mouth fell open and blood oozed from the left side of his lips, eyes shocked wide and unfocused. Fear that Lavi could not explain threatened to suddenly turn his intestines to water within him, a horror so deep it almost froze him where he stood. He raised his hammer and charged without the slightest idea what he was going to hit with it, anger and fear and denial twisting in his chest, fire burning in his veins – for a brief moment before he moved to strike he had only one thought in all of his mind: keeping Kanda alive.

Something slipped in his mind, something he hadn't felt for more than half of a year, and he came up short, his arm lifted but unwilling to come down again. The Japanese man looked up at him with eyes that didn't focus properly and looked for a split second like he might try to say something, before he pulled back with a gasp. But somehow, with his chest compressed as if by pressure and his head tilted into the brick as if by force, the smaller man still managed to seem like he was prettier than most ink on paper.

_Shit, Lavi, you're making your head hurt. Just _save_ him!_

"_La—"_ The shadow that lay oddly across Kanda's chest grew suddenly out from his body until it seemed to take on a shape of its own, no longer the strange condensed mist it had been but instead a perfectly human looking figure, cloaked in darkness. It was only when Lavi saw what might have been a hand on Kanda's hair, the other on his chest, and something that might have been a downward tilted face that his arm finally did as he had wanted.

Not quite fast enough.

The samurai, expecting the strange, mist-like thing before him to try and kill him in the next few seconds, was shocked still at the warm, gentle brush of something against his lips. It was different, delicate and soft and wonderful, a sort of _rush_ filled his chest and he wished, somehow, that he understood what it was happening to his body and to his lips. It felt… _good._ Like a kiss that made every part of him sing from the bottom of his feet to the top of his head, every fiber of his being desiring nothing else for the remainder of his very short, very pleasant life. Before the feeling could end of its own volition, a serpent of flame engulfed the shadow before him, though his skin felt no heat from it, and no pain beside the press of that too powerful hand against his ribcage.

He had two broken ribs if he had counted the sounds right, and the sudden loss of pressure over his abdomen only served to prove to him just how broken they were. In a swirl of fire and darkness and with shriek like a banshee, the thing let him fall to his knees unhindered, seeming to lift on the superheated air and float away, the sound it made growing more distant as it flew. The black velvet sky caught his eye for a moment before he lost sight of it, the world suddenly tilting so the stone street became like a wall against the right side of his face, the far building a brick colored ceiling. He _hurt_ everywhere, even though he felt indefinably numb. The icy handle of Mugen, fallen from his grip in the fray, seemed like a distant lightning rod prickling the ends of his fingers.

"Yuu…" Lavi's voice groaned the name down at him, vague and low; the apprentice Bookman's throat seemed raw from either screaming or the fire, though neither really made sense. With a growl Kanda rolled himself over at it, scowling up at the redhead who had come up behind him and stood looking at him with open concern on his face, hammer in his right hand, left clutched over the same shoulder. The moment their eyes met the younger man smiled, genuinely this time, before slumping to his knees beside him. "Shit… how can you…? You look…"

"Shut _up_ you moron." Kanda found that even if he could roll onto his back he couldn't do anything more than that besides angle is body upward using his elbows. God, he felt sick. And heavy. And like he had run into one too many walls with his spine in the past few minutes. With a groan that was two parts pain and one part frustration he let himself fall back against the ground, eyes squinted tightly shut. "Fucking thing broke my ribs." He groused in explanation. There were suddenly hands on his chest, trying to be soft, and he clenched his teeth in an effort not to kill the redhead for doing that without asking. Love, like, the fear of dying alone – none of that made poking broken bones any more forgivable.

Lavi made a short whistling sound as he pulled his hands away so that Kanda would look up at him, fiery hair haloed in orange by the moonlight. "You didn't just break 'em, you should've punctured a lung."

"Che. I did."

"Um… then why are you talking?" Lavi's tone was incredulous, his left hand suddenly fisted on the older man's shirt while the right fell away to the coolness of the cobblestones. Soundlessly, Kanda cracked an eye at him and furrowed his eyebrows, confusion taking the place of his usually glare. There had been a note of concern in the apprentice Bookman's voice, the kind of feeling the younger man usually expressed for Lenalee when she was wounded, not _Kanda_ when he was breathing freely despite a messed up lung.

The samurai didn't manage to suppress a shiver as the wind lifted again, cold and biting. "Che. I heal quickly."

"Well, yeah, I've seen that before but… I saw you cough up blood and you _say_ you punctured a lung and it should have taken you at least a—" He stopped himself suddenly and leaned forward, green eye wide. "Yuu-chan do you… have the shivers?" As he spoke his shrunk his weapon to its transportable size and tucked it away – with the sounds their assailant had made, he doubted it would be back for more anyway.

"N-no." The rattling of teeth against each other proved just how much that was a lie. To Kanda's surprise, the larger man took a firm hold of his jacket and a bit of the shirt underneath and yanked him upward, dragging him away from the ground with enough force to make getting his legs under him a painful if possible feat. The redhead took Kanda's left arm and slung it over his neck, using his right arm as a sort of back and hip brace for the more wounded man. Kanda glared at him. It was obvious by the shine in his eyes and the tension in his jaw that he was on the verge of conveying in rather vulgar terms just how little he needed the stupid apprentice Bookman to help him, so Lavi leaned a bit to the side and kissed the flushed flesh of his chilled cheek, an act that rendered the samurai too shocked for speech.

Lavi stifled a laugh at his friend's expense. "Now we can go back to our little roost, lick our wounds – _heh heh_ – and see if Allen-chan's in range of the wireless. With any luck, he'll be back in time for dinner and we can talk about that… thing that attacked us, hm?" He cocked his head gently to the side and smiled his most winning smile as he guided them slowly toward the end of the alley. He kept his right hand just low enough on Kanda's back that he could reach for his weapon if he needed to, and didn't say a word about the Japanese man's white knuckled grip on his katana; even if their assailant had somehow flow or run off in the direction of the graveyard, Lavi did not trust himself to see what might be lurking around the next corner or huddling in the nearest shadow. But all the same, Kanda didn't need to be reminded of his borderline paranoia.

"Accommodator." Kanda growled at him. "I'm ninety percent sure."

"Why's that?"

"I'm never heard of an akuma that you can't really see. And like hell one would say things like that."

"Eliade did."

"Huh?"

They had come to the end of the alley and Lavi guided them left. He realized with a bit of surprise that the older man wasn't even trying to dictate what path it was that they took, nor was he attempting to withhold too much of his weight from the redhead's side. It was as if someone had hit the Japanese man with a magic wand and made him unafraid of physical weakness. The thought made Lavi smile, if only internally. "C'mon, I'm sure you've heard stories. Eliade was one willing woman if I ever—"

"What did you hear back there? I heard it call me… something, and then it called me an irritating wanker. Whatever the fuck that means." By now the samurai's breathing was a bit heavy; their pacing being a bit harsh for his current state, and Lavi slowed a fraction, pretending to have a slight limp in case Kanda noticed.

"Really? I heard it say I was nice looking, and then it offered to make me...um… happy. And then it called you an irritating wanker." He frowned, thoughtfully. "Whatever. We can think about this after we've found Allen and you're bandaged. Maybe have a look at my shoulder too."

"Che. I can walk fine if you're—"

"It's ok. Gosh Yuu-chan, don't let me make you show concern for another human being all of a sudden…"

"I'm not…showing… _fuck_…"

"Yeah Yuu-chan, you just keep denying it and I'll forget all about how much you love me."

"I swear you want me to kill you."

"Naw, I just wanna tease you."

"I don't care what you want. Don't tease m—"

"_Kanda! Lavi! What happened?!"_

"So much for wireless communication."

"Che. So much for peace."

"So cold, Yuu-chan. So cold."

Allen, slightly winded and sweaty as if he had been running for quite some time, came to a stop in front of them, silver eyes as round and wide as saucer dishes. For a moment he studied them both, Lavi holding a small portion of Kanda's weight, Kanda appearing to hate the fact that he was, and frowned. There was something _different_ about the way the two touched each other – and a familiar looking lightly colored smear on the fabric of Lavi's eye patch. Allen suddenly found himself two parts curious and one part terrified – for something of the nature he suspected to take place between these two young men obliterated every assumption he had ever made about the innermost workings of Kanda Yuu.

Lavi shifted a little and Kanda stiffened, then winced and forced himself to relax again. The apprentice Bookman raised the hand he had on the samurai's hip to the small of his back almost unnoticeably. "Is something wrong, Allen-chan? We're kinda… on our way to get Yuu-chan wrapped and my shoulder fixed so…" The Japanese man looked up at him with a scathing scowl and he grinned, laughing forcedly. "It's just a little overextended nothing a little rubbing won't repair!" He admitted in a rush, waving his left hand as if that proved his right perfectly healthy. To his surprise Kanda didn't push the subject and instead let it go with a soft, tired looking sigh, eyes suddenly averted.

"Che. I bet you lied about how you lost your eye, too."

"N—"

"You mean the whaling accident?" Allen chimed at once. "Being harpooned in the head in a rowboat, right?"

"Haha, what on Earth are you talking about?!" Lavi's acting talents couldn't quite hide the fear in his voice.

Kanda narrowed his eyes at the redhead, taking a bit more of his weight on his feet, and glared harder, irises made black in the semidarkness. He did not say anything – he simply continued to look at the apprentice Bookman as if there wasn't a single thing about him that he believed.

Lavi felt his chest tighten. "Look, I didn't lose my eye in an injury and I don't like telling people about it so… I lied to you both. Thank you Allen for making Yuu-chan hate me."

"I don't hate you."

"By the way, Lavi…" Allen went on as if he expected the entire argument to blow over now that he wasn't a part of it. It seemed to Lavi that sometimes the younger boy was so busy trying to be polite and concerned that he forgot all about keeping with the conversation and _listening_ to others. It was a bit like how he threw himself into battle without a plan or a care that he would most likely die for his lack of logic; he smiled and nodded without ever really hearing almost anything at all, too concerned for what had gone wrong to care about the inner workings of himself or others. "What hurt the two of you? Akuma? You don't seem very… uptight and I didn't see anything…" He moved to Kanda's side slowly, then seemed to decide that he would rather be out of range of Mugen and circled around behind them, coming to stand by Lavi. Tentatively, they started to move again. "Were there more of those… things that got you the first time?" He pressed softly.

Lavi shook his head, being the more vocal of the older two males he took the initiative and talked as they walked, a bit faster now that he wasn't paying too much attention to Kanda's weight. "We were attacked by… something. It was either an akuma that can survive both a straight hit from Hell's Insects and my fire seal, or it's a person kind of like how Crowley was – I mean a really confused and misguided Exorcist." A sharp elbow from his right let him know who Kanda thought was _confused and misguided._ He rolled his eye at the Japanese man before he elected to go on with his conversation as if it hadn't happened. "You can't _see_ it, not really. It kind of looks like dark mist, but you wouldn't know it was there unless you were really looking for it. That's how it threw Yuu-chan and pinned me the first time – after that it just tried to off him like I wasn't important, and looked more...solid."

"And then the idiot hesitated." Kanda threw in with a voice that was more a bark than a real statement. It made Allen want to laugh despite the seriousness of the accusation.

"I did _not_ hesitate; I was trying to be sure I didn't take off your toes when I brought my hammer down."

"Right. It's not like you don't have 20/20 vision, Cyclops."

"Actually it's better than 20/20. And trust me; I didn't want to hit you when you were already coughing up blood."

"Coughing up blood?"

"Che. I was not _coughing_, it just so happened to leak—"

"Ew… save the gory details for after dinner, Yuu-chan."

"You brought it up!"

"We're here." Allen's words made them realize that they were indeed standing outside of _The Blue Roost_, the larger two bruised and dirty and hunched a bit into each other, Allen watching them both from the corner of his eye. The white fog that formed before each of their mouths warned that it would likely snow tonight, or the rain would freeze if the weather chose to do that instead, and the British boy took a moment to feel jealous of Lavi having fur on his ears. And then he remembered – people weren't supposed to see those. "Lavi, you should maybe put your hood up before we go inside. As fun as it is watching your ears be paranoid for you, we don't want to get shot."

The redhead turned to him and pursed his lips, ears flattened against his skull as if in annoyance. "No one would shoot me for having cat ears."

"Sure they would. Oh! I have to tell you about Eva Rothchild!"

"Che. Can we have this conversation without standing so I can't _fucking_ _breathe?_"

"Oh… sorry…"

-- -- --

The bed was, at least, decently firm. It was not, however, very even. The sheets were warm and smooth, the topmost blanket light enough to keep in the heat without feeling constricting, the pillows fluffy but not to the point of putting a crick in anyone's neck. The unevenness and therefore the discomfort, came from the fact that no matter how they did it, Kanda weighed just so much more than Allen, and the British boy continually rolled into his sore (if not broken) chest because of it. With most things explained between them about the Innocence, dinner eaten, and Lavi's eye patch clean, there was nothing to keep them all from resting for the following day – which would include much walking and talking and being around _people_ no matter how much Kanda wanted to avoid it.

And yet none of them were sleeping. Lavi was _still_ trying to find a position worth sleeping in and Allen would snicker to himself half-silently on the occasion that he hadn't rolled into Kanda to be growled at. Between it all – being hurt, Allen being stupid, Lavi being childish – the samurai knew that rest for them was hours off.

After a long moment of silence the white haired teen beside him let out a slow, soft sigh and rolled against his right arm, _snuggling_. He was really asleep this time, his breathing slow and even.

_Do not. Kill him. Be calm. Ask him to move. You can prove to Lavi that you have self control if you just…_

An arm wound its way around his aching chest.

"Oi! Moyashi. You want to have fingers in the morning or what?" His progress was slow.

A pair of silver eyes blinked up at him, foggy and sleepy and laughing, and he felt himself lift his upper lip in a snarl. The smaller Exorcist smiled amiably at him, all politeness and irritating naivety. "I'm sorry Kanda, the attraction is gravitational. I can't stop myself from touching you anymore than the moon can escape the pull of the Earth."

"Fucking _bullshit._"

Lavi let out a half-strangled gasp of laughter. The room, what with a ceiling that was mostly wood and walls that were the same, made the sound perfectly audible to Kanda's ears. Regardless of that fact, the redhead pushed himself up on his elbows and leaned a little out of his bed to speak to the other two Exorcists. "You keep saying things like that and you'll start making me worry, Allen-chan." He warned, and the plopped himself down restlessly onto his stomach, punching his pillow into submission under his chin while he looked over at the Japanese man with a strange, thoughtful expression on his face. "You ok, Yuu-chan? You've got… super dark circles and you look kinda pale…"

"I am tired." The samurai responded at once, and rolled promptly onto his side, facing the redhead, which left Allen between his back and the wall. The younger boy made a little sound of discontent but didn't outright protest. "If you would shut up and Moyashi would _stop touching me_ I might get some Goddamn rest before the sun comes up." His nostrils flared as he breathed deeply inward and outward again, anger flashing darkly in his eyes. The man across from him smiled gently at him and reached out with his left hand, not quite able to touch him from the distance between the beds.

"If Allen sleeps on his back, facing the wall, and you face me, maybe you can kind of lean a little and sleep like that."

"Hmm…" The British boy grumbled softly in response to the suggestion. "That might work…"

Kanda watched the apprentice Bookman, already on his side, as the bed bounced and squeaked and rocked with Allen's movements. Before long he felt the soft, neutral press of a back against his own, just a small touch without being anything but an accident, solid and sure. He could deal with that, being there weren't anymore options for him anyway.

"Aren't your ribs killing you?" Lavi whispered the question now, though Kanda couldn't imagine why. Who fell asleep that quickly? Not Moyashi, he was certain.

He shook his head a little. "I heal quickly." That had always been the answer he had given to the question about his injuries, and the redhead took it with a furrowed brow and a little nod of his head, as if to pretend he were not curious. The hand that Lavi had hung off of the mattress gave a little twitch toward Kanda and the Japanese man reached out for it without thinking, his cold fingers woven at once through Lavi's fingers.

The apprentice Bookman stiffened, green eye wide, but the reaction righted itself quickly, and Lavi gave his hand a little squeeze. "You're… a lot different on the inside than you are everyday, huh, Yuu-chan?" The words came out very softly, but they seemed to hit the older man like a knife in the chest all the same. The redhead didn't let himself regret them though. Kanda's eyes grew perfectly round and then narrowed into a scowl, his mouth quirked down at the corners before he dragged it down entirely, yet the tender lay of his cheek on his pillow never changed. If it was true or not didn't matter – he had expected the observation at least a little.

"Che. It's not that complicated." The Japanese man answered even more quietly than Lavi had asked. "I'm trying… to… let myself do things that…" He paused, searching for words. "Show my vulnerability. I don't like to but… you'll never know what you mean to me if I call you _Baka Koneko_ and trip you in the halls and steal your eye patch like some parts of me want to." By now he was blushing deeply, very deeply, and Lavi's hand gave his hand another reassuring little twitch.

"You think a lot more than I've ever given you credit for."

Kanda scoffed.

"Really!" The apprentice Bookman pressed on quietly. Allen let out a soft snore and he smiled, eye focused momentarily behind the Japanese man, before he went on in an almost silent voice. "You're… more concerned with others than I think you realize. I mean, most of the time you act like you don't give a damn—"

"Because I _don't_ give a damn."

"But at the same time, you've watched me enough to figure out that I haven't tried to figure out how you work. Even before you liked me, you had to have cared enough to look at me and decide how much of yourself to present, right?"

"No. I show everyone the same thing."

"But not forever, obviously." Lavi went on as if he had only just realized it now, all in a rush. His eye danced with a sort of hidden light and Kanda rolled his eyes before shutting them, the last thing he cared about was someone else's outlook on his personality – especially now that he was in the process of attempting to make it more personable. When he was finished and Lavi knew every quirk and reason and thing that annoyed him, he might lend an ear if only for a moment. "You start off just as frigid to everyone," Lavi went on, "But… over time you change, just like everyone else. But you've never tried to change, have you? You've never said to yourself, _'this person doesn't like this about me, maybe I should do something different_,' because that's not how you are. You don't like people so why change to make them like you?" He paused to breathe and gave the hand in his a little tug, no longer seeing the man in front of him so much as looking past him, lost in his thoughts. "So really… you don't pretend. You don't lie about anything. You just exist as you always have without letting anyone see your weaknesses because it's natural for you to hide them – not because you're ashamed of having them." He stopped. The hand in his had grown limp over the last part, when he had been talking very slowly and softly, thinking aloud more than actually sharing his thoughts. He saw the reason at once and smiled at it. Kanda, with his hair in a loose pony tail at his neck and lips softly parted, had fallen asleep listening to the apprentice Bookman try to analyze his personality to his face.

With a sigh Lavi swung his feet out from under the covers and stood, keeping Kanda's hand in his as he moved. Gently he took the two steps needed to lay the samurai's hand on the bed beside him, and then paused, looking down at those features in sleep. There wasn't even an indent in Kanda's forehead from frowning so much. It seemed just a bit unfair. It also seemed a bit wrong that despite how cold he was, the man looked so very sweet while sleeping.

_Goodnight._ Lavi leaned down and pressed his lips to the skin of Kanda's cheek before he turned away to crawl back into bed himself.

-- -- --

The hours crawled by like snails on too rough stone; slow and oddly unnerving to Lavi's rampantly thinking mind. As hard as he tried to sleep the act still seemed impossible. The moonlight in the window, cast by a slightly larger disk than it had been the previous night, wore at his nerves unendingly, as if it willed him to go outside and wander, see something besides the same four walls and ceiling.

For about five minutes, he found solace studying Kanda's face in the dark. He had always been able to see relatively well with minimal light – or to predict what would be there or to memorize how something looked in the daytime – but now was different. The bit of hair that had fallen in front of the sleeping man's nose waved ever so slightly in the breeze of his breath, and the motion was as obvious as a door opening and closing in the middle of his face – made all the more evident by it's movement. Lavi did not have time to contemplate his new way of seeing things in the dark, however, as the Japanese man's expression changed, eyebrows pushed together as if he were thinking too hard to be sleeping. The starlight caught a bead of perspiration on the samurai's brow and reflected it into the room. The redhead frowned at Kanda's grimace and wondered if a nightmare had claimed his friend's mind of the moment, and if he would want to be woken from it if that was the case. A dark eyebrow crinkled inward and Kanda pulled his lower lip between his teeth, his breathing rapid, while the apprentice Bookman began to think about giving his shoulder a little shake. He'd most likely be punched for it, but that wasn't an issue when Kanda's mental health might be at stake.

And then the older man thrashed, wildly, tangling himself in the covers and drawing a startled, half-wakeful sound from the boy at his side. Lavi sat up and started to move, reaching out to touch the sweat soaked fabric of the Japanese man's sheet.

He didn't quite make it.

With a jerk that would have made anyone else who had broken their ribs earlier in the day cry out in agony, Kanda sat up, gasping in great heaving breaths, shaking all over. The redhead watched wide-eyed as the dark haired man placed his right hand to his chest and closed his eyes, swallowing with difficulty, attempting to make himself calm. It took a long time, Kanda's eyebrows would twitch with some hidden emotion every so often and he would grip the fabric of his shirt with renewed strength before his expression grew smooth again, relaxed, and he sighed.

Lavi wanted to say something, to ask what it was that bothered him, but he couldn't find the words for it. Instead he heard the Japanese man shake his head as his shoulders slumped a little, as if an impossible weight had been added to his shoulders. Just when he thought the older man was about to lie down and go back to sleep as if nothing had happened, Kanda became completely rigid, his right hand going to his mouth while his left tore the covers from his legs, frantic. Lavi couldn't stop himself from reaching out as Kanda fumbled out of bed and shot for the bathroom like a madman, bare feet thunderous on the far less than sound proof floor.

He made out the crash of the bathroom door being thrown open, feet on tile, and then a growling retch that could only be the predecessor to vomiting.

Kanda did not know what was wrong with him. He crouched in front of the off-white toilet and proceeded to empty his stomach of what little dinner he had managed to eat – nothing had seemed appetizing but he had eaten for the sake of it all the same – trembling uncontrollably and hating every moment of it. He wasn't sick often, and he threw up even less, so when the dry heaves hit with toe-curling force, he found himself unable to stop himself from groaning loudly through them. It didn't really occur to him that he should concern himself with being quiet until a warm hand pressed on his shoulder and another pulled the loose strands of his hair away from his face, so quiet he almost choked on his own saliva. Instead he reached out and flushed the toilet, because looking at what had come up from his gut wasn't helping it settle any.

The hand on his shoulder ran up and down his spine soothingly, and he realized that he must have woken Lavi with his retching. He let himself accept the touch, because it didn't matter anyway, it was humiliating enough to throw up in front of him; being tired wasn't going to hurt his reputation anymore than it already had been. So leaned his forehead on the cool toilet seat, closing his eyes to the dull throbbing in his temples. For a time he continued to suffer the occasion clenching of his stomach muscles, and each time a little moan of displeasure escaped his throat. The hand never left his back for a moment.

He had the disgusting sensation that his face was beginning to stick to the porcelain under his forehead. Lavi let his hair go and pulled one of the small hand towels from the back of the latrine before moving to run it under the warm water from the sink, working as if it was completely normal for the Japanese man to be so violently ill. Kanda stayed where he was, breathing slowly, and watched the redhead wring the water from the soft white cloth before it was proffered to him.

He took it and wiped his face and mouth, leaning heavily on his left arm.

Lavi started running the cold water then, and filled the tiny cup next to the faucet with a steady hand. "Did you have a nightmare?" The question was almost drowned by the sound of a cricket chirping, but Kanda still heard it, and accepted the cup of offered water with a sigh. When he brought the liquid to his lips he found it pleasantly cool, and strangely sweet in comparison to the bile he had tasted only moments before.

Kanda shook his head. "Nothing I haven't dreamed before." His voice was raspy, his throat dry and aching from everything he had just put it through. His arms shook slightly and he lowered them to his lap, holding the cup against the tile between his knees. It was cold in just his boxers. "It didn't…" He went on with a wave at the toilet. "Do that to me. Che. I don't even know where _that _came from."

"Stressed out?"

"Not that much."

"Feel sick?"

"Not now that I've vomited."

Lavi's face became a little thoughtful, his ears pressed out to the side, lips pursed, and he moved forward, kneeling in front of Kanda with his arms extended. The Japanese man shivered when he felt how warm the other man was, and couldn't help but relinquish himself to the touch with nothing but a sigh as protest. The feeling of warm flesh on his face was more than reassuring. "If you don't feel ok just say so. I think Allen-chan and I can handle ourselves tomorrow if you need to rest." The words were said against Kanda's left shoulder and he realized, with how his hands slid down the apprentice Bookman's bare back, that they were almost naked together again. No sexual thoughts came to life in his mind, however, and he shook his head, feeling the motion rock the redhead a little more against him.

"I'm fine. Just tired." And it mostly wasn't a lie.

"You wanna sleep with me instead of trying to fight the sprout for leg room? He spreads if you're gone too long."

Kanda seemed to think about it for a moment, weighing such comfort and closeness with the things that would happen when Allen woke in the morning, but he decided not to think about it. He was too tired to get himself or Lavi naked, let alone do anything besides hold the larger man close. It was another thing he wouldn't have done before – he would have shoved Lavi away and slept on the bathroom floor before he accepted his kindness. "Ok."

-- -- --

**Yes, it's a strange place to end, and the chapter went VERY quickly, but it's what it wanted. Thank you for reading my semi-unbeta'd fail and please review if you feel like it! 8D**

**If you see any typos, feel free to tell me. :3**

**See ya'll next chapter!**


	14. Sensitivity and Malady

**BETA IS STILL ON HIATUS! – and thanks everyone who tried to help last chapter! The only things that people tried to change that I didn't like were stylistic or suggesting that I don't use the subjunctive. 8-)**

**Sorry for not answering all of the reviews – I will, but holidays are evil.**

**For the record – NO KANDA IS NOT PREGNANT. Niamh Hyacinth Arawn never plans to write an mpreg. Ever. Not my thing.**

**Also, I am aware that public restrooms during the time period in which D. Gray takes place were bushes on hillsides that no one happened to be looking at. For the sake of being sanitary, avoiding dysentery, and saving Kanda's pretty face, we shall pretend that someone invented Lysol, Hiney-Hiders, and Quilted Northern sometime in the 15****th**** century and they are now norms all over Europe.**

**Furthermore, there is no such thing as a bidet.**

**And now that that's out of the way… wow guys, your reviews have been spectacular!**

**Disclaimer: I still do not own D. Gray – Man. If I did… Lavi would show that angry, fiery side that matches his hair more often.**

**WARNINGS: More lack of naked! Mild shounen-ai! Mild violence! Cursing! Exclamation points!**

**-- -- --**

Part Thirteen: Sensitivity and Malady

Lavi tried not to panic.

When they came back into the room together, Kanda a little pale looking still but otherwise normal, Allen had indeed spread himself out across the mattress like there had never been another body in the bed with him. The Japanese man didn't seem to care however, and took up the space Lavi had offered in the other bed without even asking which was the side he should sleep on. Lavi was a bit taken aback by his willingness, mystified by his trust, astounded by his seeming weakness, but he did not let any of that bother him as he clamored into bed beside him, tugging the covers over them both. This time, unlike the last night they had shared a bed together, Kanda didn't try to face away from him. Lavi found himself folded gently in the other man's arms, his head tucked down under the samurai's chin so his ears just barely tickled the underside of his jaw.

And even though he _did_ think about sex for a moment, he didn't react to the thought.

For a long time he just laid there in the dark, his left hand captured in Kanda's right, and _worried_ about what had made his best-friend-turned-lover sick so suddenly, what made his skin so cold. There had to be something because no one – especially not Kanda – threw up for no reason besides the urge to get rid of what they had eaten for dinner. It was only when Lavi's eye had fallen shut tiredly and the fingers in his hand had gone almost entirely dead did he realize what he was doing. It wasn't that his thoughts were wrong, or that his ideas miscalculated, it was that he was _feeling_ worried. Really, deep down, _feeling_ it.

It hurt to stop it. He _had_ to stop it. He had to slide that wall of glass between what he seemed to feel and what he felt, what he thought and what emotions tried to conclude for him.

But he couldn't. It wasn't that this was Kanda and Kanda meant more to him that should or anything like that – and it wasn't a flaw in _Lavi._ It was something feral and hot and violent, something that made his jaw clench and his eye squint shut, a stopper that kept the barrier from sliding into place. He tried repeatedly, going through the same processes he had a number of times when he had started to lose himself to another personality, but the wall refused to budge passed that layer of emotion. His fingers twitched at it, just enough to alert the man beside him.

"Che. Stop thinking and go to sleep." The words spread across his hair and into his ears, warm and breathy. "I'm not dying."

"Sorry." Lavi whispered back, not completely sure what he was apologizing for but relatively certain it was what Kanda wanted all the same. He let out a sigh and unwound their fingers before pressing his right hand to the left side of the samurai's chest, tracing it in order to distract himself from the problems within his own skull. For two whole minutes he continued to follow the black lines that he couldn't see, Kanda tense under his ministrations. "It's an Om, isn't it? That thing here." He said despite his lover's silence. "It's either Sanskrit or that other kind of Sanskrit they use in Buddhist mantras in Japan. If it's normal Sanskrit, you're missing the stroke for the dream state. If it's that other kind then…" He tapered off, brow furrowed, aware that the arms around his shoulders had grown a bit stiffer than only a moment before. It didn't matter really, thinking about the pattern under the bandage his fingers were touching was distracting him from his own unsolvable problem. "I don't know. It's supposed to be something a bellybutton and a lotus flower and sleeping, right? What it symbolizes." He stopped again. The breath on the top of his head had grown suddenly short, the muscles under his touch very stiff, almost as if frightened. For a moment he tried to chuckle in an effort to take his words back, even if curiosity had alighted fresh in his mind. "What? You have a lotus somewhere too, Yuu-chan?" He tried to tease.

The Japanese man was silent while the tension slowly ran out of his arms with a sigh. He didn't seem irritated so much as exasperated, unsure. "You've seen it." His reply was too quiet, almost inaudible between them.

"What?"

"In my room. On the corner stand, in the hourglass."

"Oooh." Lavi's ears flicked back and forth a bit with his nod. "Then… what's the connection?" He prodded softly. He figured he could venture an educated guess, but he didn't want to make the smaller man tell him anything he didn't want to – which was very not Bookman of him. The hand that had rested on his came back again, pulling his hand away from Kanda's chest.

The Japanese man shifted until they were looking at each other, his sunken, tired eyes showing every glimmer of sickness that he felt. At once the apprentice Bookman regretted his curiosity; the story he wanted to hear would take a lot of effort to tell and it was asking too much to make his best friend say it all now, with his expression being so ill and tired and uncharacteristically caring. In a rush he decided that knowing now didn't matter. He wanted to log it away for the records, he wanted to know more about Kanda, but he also wanted something _else_ that he couldn't even describe between them, something he _shouldn't_ want. And the wall, the ever important wall, was broken and wouldn't go back into place no matter how much he pushed it.

"Lavi that's… the one thing I don't ever tell anyone."

"You never tell anyone anything."

"I told you that I love you."

"That's not what I mean. I don't know about your past or anything like that. You could be a reincarnation of Shiva's wife for all I know."

Kanda scowled. "That's Hinduism."

"I knew that."

After a time Kanda drew the apprentice Bookman in just a fraction of a centimeter, unaware just how much closer that drove Lavi to him. He laid his face against the side of the redhead's hair so his lips just tickled the top of his ears. "You don't need details. All you need to know is that if that flower dies, so do I. The end." Lavi stiffened against him suddenly and he held tighter to him, as if he would move away without arms anchoring him in place. "It's more complicated, but that's all you need to know."

"But…" There was something undeniably shaky in the redhead's voice. "It's a lotus right? Won't it bloom again in a thousand years?"

"Che. No."

"Oh." Lavi breathed out softly. He didn't want Kanda to die. He didn't want to _think_ about Kanda dying. To his horror the feeling of _fear_ that settled in his stomach was just as close as the _worry_ had been, and the flicker of pain and potential loss was all right there, seeping in through that little crack in his mind faster than he knew what to do with it. He needed Bookman. Bookman would know exactly what he needed to do to draw the veils shut again, but without him – without him he could only think that someone he really _cared_ about was telling him about how it was that they were eventually going to die.

_No Lavi. Do not go off the deep end with this. Do not. Just don't do it. Just—_

Kanda looked down at him and frowned softly, and then a hand was on his face, a thumb running slowly beneath the hollow of his left eye. It was too late. He was sinking like a rock in the water now. "Don't tell me you're making that face because you're worried about me." The Japanese man's words were incredulous, the hand on his skin cool even with the covers pulled up so tight around them both.

For the first time in recent history, when Lavi spoke the things he said were true of every part of him. "I don't like the idea of losing you."

To his slight surprise Kanda smirked at him, as if that admission was a small twisted victory to hold in his heart. "You won't. Not for a while at least. Now stop poking into my personal life and get some _fucking_ shut eye before I stab you." The threat had all of the love and affection of a romantic confession, and the little lift to Kanda's features only grew more obvious as he pulled the redhead back to how they had been: his chin between the larger man's ears. Lavi sighed into Kanda's throat, tickling it. Kanda ran his right hand slowly up and down his side, feeling him relax as he did.

"I'm _so_ fucked." The apprentice Bookman observed aloud.

The samurai closed his eyes to the sound, not knowing what exactly was meant by it. "We're all fucked. It's only a matter of when."

"You're supposed to be an optimist."

"Che. I'm looking forward to fucking you the first chance I get."

"You _know_ that's not what I meant."

"Yeah… I know."

-- -- --

Allen woke very early, painfully early, early enough to want to just roll over and go back to sleep if he didn't have things to do before he headed out with the others. Like breakfast and teasing. Those were tied for number one on the _Thing to Do_ list – followed swiftly by touching Kanda's hair and blaming Lavi for it. Because that would be funny, if he knew either of them. He needed to add a few more things to the list, things that were dangerous and would get him killed if he was found out, but would undoubtedly leave both Lavi and Kanda giggling and glaring like madmen. Now, with the two of them snogging at almost every opportunity, it wasn't _really_ interfering when he was just making their boring lives more interesting, was it?

With a long, happy sigh he pushed the soft, warm blue fabric of the comforter away and stretched before turning to Kanda with a smile.

But Kanda wasn't there. In the golden morning light there was nothing but white sheets tangled messily around him, not even a long black hair on either of the pillows. He cast his eyes slowly around the room until he found it – the shine of blue-black tresses across a plush white pillow, hanging out of Lavi's bed. Curiosity got the better of him. He swung his legs quietly from the side of the bed and stood up, thankful the window was on the other side of the room and he couldn't block the sun and wake up either of them with the change of light.

Kanda lay on his side, right arm draped around Lavi's shoulders, left pressed to the flesh of his stomach, the redhead's right cat ear tucked under his chin. Lavi was hugging him back too, with his left hand under the covers and across the Japanese man's waist, right tangled in a ribbon of dark hair next to his face. It was like something out of a photo album, with the shine of the light and their expressions, like they were perfectly content to just be there, cuddling in the cool morning air. With another sigh Allen turned away toward the bathroom – if the two of them were that comfortable together he wouldn't wake them out of cruelty, he would get a shower while there was still warm water to be had.

Though he would have to scald away any sex germs that were still in the bathtub with a nice barrage of steaming hot water first.

At the sound of the shower turning on, loud and whistling as if all of the water was hot, Lavi's left ear twitched and his eye came slowly open. For a short time he wasn't sure where he was or who was curled beside him, and then the memories came seeping back in a deliberate wave. The alley, dinner, Kanda's nightmare, him being sick, curling together to pass the night, conjecturing about the Om on the man's chest, _feeling_ – the last one struck him a little: it should have been the first to come to mind, really. Now though, with his mind a bit rested from sleep, he leaned a little more closely to Kanda's chest, just to see if any sort of emotion seeped into his mind that should not have been there.

A stab of happiness shot through his chest with enough intensity to leave him shaking. It was worse. A lot worse. It wasn't the same as _Lavi_ feeling happy either – it was something else entirely.

_At least I haven't felt old emotions… small favors._

The Japanese man turned a little, his hand sailing slowly down Lavi's back, and he sighed, spreading warm air across the redhead's hair and the back of his neck. The apprentice Bookman couldn't help but squirm a little at it, tilting his head away from the brush of warm air on such a sensitive part of his skin.

Kanda made a short clicking sound in the back of his throat and growled softly. Lavi felt the press of warm lips against his hair.

"You awake?"

"Uh huh." Answering made Lavi feel just that much more awkward.

"Hn." But Kanda didn't seem to notice or care. He just pulled back enough to let Lavi look up at him and placed a hand softly on the back of his head, fingers carding through his hair. Lavi didn't mind the touch, but it drew up a thousand thoughts and emotions he hadn't remembered feeling previously.

_So very screwed…_

He needed to forget how very bad off he was. He needed a distraction.

"So… we gonna cuddle until Allen-chan's outta the shower?" He asked in a very soft voice, his fingers tracing over the swath of fabric over Kanda's chest. He continued to look at it rather than the older man's face – it felt somehow safer than trying to read his emotions for some reason.

Kanda made a coughing sound like a laugh. "It's not cuddling. I'm holding you."

"Same damn thing."

"Whatever. We're staying this way unless you think we can have sex in the fifteen minutes it will take him to get out of there."

"Um. No. And even if we could it would hurt one of us like a mother to do it without something to make it…slippery."

"Spit."

"Not my ass you're not. Unless you have an epic tolerance for pain, that's a no." Lavi stated with an upward glance. To his surprise Kanda was smirking at him again, his still tired eyes showing the genuineness of the expression; he was _happy_. It made the apprentice Bookman feel another little poke of contentment, his chest tightening with something like good feeling pain, or maybe bad feeling glee, but he couldn't say which. Either way, the emotion willed him up to touch Kanda's lips softly with his own, and the contact made the emotion only that much worse and better at once. He _wanted_ it and enjoyed it, and yet he knew there were reasons he shouldn't be doing either. It lasted only a short time, shy and more meaningful to him than most of what he had done with the other man of late, and he was left with one hand on the side of Kanda's face, cupping his cheek bone, and the other in his hair, memorizing the feel against his fingers. They stayed that way, even when the kiss broke and Kanda was looking down at him, studying his expression. He didn't shy away or blush or feel frightened. He felt like he had everything he wanted right in front of him, and he cared about it more than he should.

"Lavi I… how come you've been kissing me so much?" Kanda asked with a brush of his fingers through the front of the redhead's hair. Lavi tilted his head into the touch and fought down the urge to purr – he couldn't do that and talk at the same time he didn't think.

"Honestly…" He said quietly, dragging his own fingers down a line of ebony tresses. "This is gonna sound really crazy but you just have to follow me. Normally I don't really… _feel_ things like normal people do. I mean, like love and stuff. Even when I'm happy I'm not… like that on the inside. But… I noticed last night that I was worried about you." He looked away then, coloring slightly, before he looked back again only a moment later, speaking in a ghost of a whisper. "_Really_ worried. I've never worried about anything that much, not really… and… I can't stop." With a bark of a laugh and forced a smile – and he _knew_ it looked forced but he didn't care, he didn't want to lie about it, not anymore than he already had – he continued on, loud and boisterous. "I'll feel better after you've had breakfast, I'm sure!"

Kanda shook his head a little and frowned, deeply. "I don't really get it, but I think I'll worry less too. The last thing I want is to jeopardize this mission." He leaned forward a bit and kissed Lavi's forehead, acting as if the action were completely normal of him. "We'll have to find a place before we go to that mansion Moyashi mentioned – the dumb woman, Gil or whatever – said they didn't serve breakfast when we got here."

Lavi nodded agreeably, glad for the little change of subject, and pushed himself away, smiling at the fact that the morning was going less awkwardly than he thought it would. Maybe, if everything went this smoothly, they'd figure out who would do what the first time without any trouble – just talking and exploring and testing of physical boundaries – and things really would work out for the best. Bookman still had a little time to train a new successor, even if the thought filled the redhead's gut with terror, Komui could take him off the list of people to kill with a Komu-Len, and he could settle down as a bookstore owner or something after everything was over. Maybe. If things kept going the way they were and Kanda even wanted to make things last. If _he _ever wanted to make things last. But there was no reason to be thinking those things really, not when the Japanese man he was thinking of was sitting up and finding clothes to wear for the day without so much as a sideways glance.

The apprentice Bookman moved to follow him, finding his suitcase for a fresh shirt and socks. They dressed in silence, not watching each other, and by the time Kanda had run a brush through his hair and tied it back again, Allen came out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam and lavender scented air, a strange little smile on his face.

"So!" The British boy chimed at the two of them as he picked his boots up from beside the door and started to put them on standing up, wet hair hanging down over his eyes. "Breakfast?"

-- -- --

"Dry toast? _Dry_ toast? That's not food. It's punishment."

"Che. What are you eating then? Crap?"

"It's a _crape_, Yuu-chan. _Crape._"

"The word has _crap_ right in it."

"If you mix up _dry toast_ you get _try toads_ – so if I'm eating crap you're eating toad."

"Che. Whatever."

"You two are so cute together…"

"_Fuck you, Moyashi."_

"Aw, you think so?"

The three of them sat in a far removed corner booth in the very back of the local café, smashed between a table, another booth, and a window that seemed to have been freshly washed for their enjoyment. The place was rather nice – on the cutting edge of dining ambiance – featuring tables painted a soft lavender and seats stuffed with down and covered with white suede, and suspended electric chandeliers designed to look like cheap upside down candelabras. The three of them could not have cared less about the décor of the place really, the menu was cheap, the food various, and their waitress hadn't so much as cocked an eyebrow at Allen's seven-note-book-page-long order. It was also – according to Jill – one of the few places open only an hour after dawn. It all fit them nicely, down to availability of tea for Kanda and sugar for Lavi's completely unnecessary coffee.

Allen didn't really care what they had available, he was eating it. Since they had arrived, the British boy had thrown in the occasional comment on the status of his friend's relationship, teasing harmlessly as he shoveled oatmeal and omelet and toast alike, enjoying his own, completely full side of the table.

Across from him and to his left, Kanda nibbled at his own food without looking, a half-disgusted and half-disinterested expression on his face, while Lavi first dissected and then consumed his chocolate filled pancake, smiling like everything was perfectly dandy and they were all chum-chum and exuberant. It struck the samurai that the redhead was either so happy he didn't know what to do with himself, or he honestly just wanted to be the most irritating adorable person in the world at the moment. He hoped it was the first. The last thing he needed was Lavi to notice how hard it was for him to choke down even a half a piece of toast, let alone two whole pieces, and he knew that unless something distracted the redhead internally, he would. Flavor had never mattered to Kanda as long as the flavor wasn't too strong, so that wasn't the thing that was bothering him, and the texture of the bread was fine – crisp but not burned and completely chewable, so if Lavi asked he wouldn't have excuse for his apathetic appetite. Whatever made eating it difficult was wrong with _him_ and he would _not_ admit that to his comrades. Not now or ever. Not unless it started to effect his work, which it wouldn't. An upset stomach had never kept him out of the field and it wasn't going to start now.

All the same, he was more than thankful when the last bite was gone.

With his hands free, he placed the right one on the table, ready for anything, while his left wandered down to his hip to rest on Mugen. His eyes scanned the expanse of the place, away from the window, and he noted just how few people there were, none of them staring or curious or even suspicious in any way. None of them seemed like Akuma.

_If that wasn't an Akuma before then… where _are_ the Akuma?_

"So the plan," Lavi chimed in an enthusiastic voice. A hand, subtle but brave, found its way to the back of the Japanese man's and gave it a little squeeze under the table. Without thinking about it Kanda let go of his sword and accept the touch of the warm, half-gloved hand in his, somehow reassuring him of everything and nothing all at once. He didn't let his eyes stop searching for even a moment. "Is to go up on that hill where this Rothchild woman's house is, ask if she died funny or if she had anything… Innocence-like or if she had strange powers, and if so get the ok to unbury her. Then, if that all works out, go get her out of the ground, get the Innocence, set everything right, and go home tomorrow. If we can't find it during the day, we search that graveyard until we're too tired to function and start against when we wake up tomorrow." When he said it that way, all in a rush, set in stone, and confident, Kanda could only hope that things would be that easy. The sooner they got everything done here the sooner he could move on with his slightly more complicated life. With Lavi. Or not. Depending.

His stomach rolled and he unconsciously closed his fingers a little more on Lavi's palm. He didn't want to throw up, not on the periwinkle table and not on the floor and definitely _not_ in front of Lavi. And he _needed_ what he had eaten. Aside from the fact that it was annoying and irksome to vomit, he also had to have sustenance – otherwise his body would suffer before too long. Allen was talking but he wasn't hearing the words, he was hearing his throat struggle with the command to swallow, and thinking about it didn't help at all. He could still feel that his tongue seemed swollen, too large for his mouth, while his salivary glands had gone into overdrive. It was going to happen. No matter how _much_ he didn't want it to happen, his toast was coming back up whether he was willing it to or not.

"…which is why I think it's not smart to—"

"Yuu-chan?"

Kanda stood, shaking off Lavi's hand, and moved away from the table with nothing more than a wave in parting. He didn't trust himself to speak, not really. His boots thumped heavier the faster he moved, and by the time he had made it into the bathroom they sounded like thunder, squeaking and hissing on the checkered tile floor. The moment he entered the water closet he thought about locking the door, and washing his face in the sink to calm down, and a thousand other little things that were ignored for the sake of propelling him closer to the nearest toilet. He hardly got into the stall and next to the latrine before the nausea overtook him, so bad this time that he could hardly stand long enough to gather his hair out of the way before his toast came back to haunt him.

His right knee took the impact when he couldn't keep himself up anymore.

After the third heave the bathroom door opened and he regretted for a moment having not found the time to lock it. From the corner of his eye he made out the toes of Lavi's boots – and then he was retching again, his stomach clamped so tightly he thought his eyes would pop out of his head from the pressure. Everything felt wrong – the toilet seat felt too warm under his hands, though still cool, the light seemed too bright from the window, the sound of footsteps too keen in his ears – and the swinging in of the stall door was no different. It was too loud and too slow, like the predecessor to something horrible. And then Lavi was beside him, just like before, getting his pants dirty on the disgusting floor, so close he could _smell_ him. Kanda wanted to tell him that he was fine – he didn't have a fever and he didn't feel _sick_ when he hadn't eaten – so there was no good reason to have that perfectly concerned, perfectly _horrified_ expression on his face. Everything would be ok as soon as there was no more bread swimming around in the sea of bile that had taken the place of his stomach.

"Oi, Yuu-chan… _shit_ you look bad…" The redhead whispered without thinking too much about what he was saying. His hand was once again in the middle of the samurai's back, running in slow, even lines across his shoulder blades. "You're sick, you can't lie about it. You're paler than you were this morning and you can't keep food down for more than ten minutes. Look, I see crust in there – _ugh_…" Lavi reached out and pushed the little lever on the toilet just as Kanda dry heaved again, his argument dying with the awful sound of him drawing up nothing but acid. The apprentice Bookman went right on talking, petting the sweat soaked line of his bangs away from his face. "It's ok. You don't have to try and be tough and stuff. You should just rest until you get better, or even just for the day – something… _fuck_ you sound like you're dying…"

"K'sh—t uh."

"Don't talk, you might choke yourself."

"_U'usei."_

"Oh, shut up?"

Kanda's only answer was a less powerful rocking against the public toilet, his fingers white knuckled as he forced himself back down again, calming his insides like he would his own composure. It didn't work as well as planned and it might have been coincidence that had made that his last physical shudder. Whatever the case was, he leaned his head on his left arm and breathed for a moment, his head throbbing like the first time, goosebumps dancing up and down his arms in horrible, tantalizing waves. Even if he felt terrible, and hungry, and _hot_, he still felt undeniably capable – there was none of the fatigue or weakness that normally came from illness, nothing physically _wrong_. Nothing bad besides the fact that everything was still too loud and bright and _there_ to be normal.

He took the wad of toilet paper he found held in front of his eyes and wiped his mouth with it before he spoke. "I'm fine."

"Yuu-chan—"

"I feel _fine._" He threw the spoiled paper into the water before he flushed it away, watching it swirl its way down. "I know you're _worried_ about me but this isn't like being sick. There's… I don't know… _ugh_…" He pushed himself up and Lavi grabbed his arm to help, he glared at the redhead, the same as always, but found himself incapable of holding the expression when faced with such concern and longing. Instead his eyes softened, and a slightly shaky hand came up to touch the middle of Lavi's chest before it moved to his shoulder and finally, when it seemed that he might shy away entirely, yanked the larger man into an embrace. Lavi was stiff for a moment – uncharacteristically stiff – before he relaxed and returned the touch with shy fingers, curling them against the Japanese man's back. "I wouldn't lie to you. I feel fine."

"Yuu…"

"But as much as I _hate_ it, you're right. No matter how good I feel, something is wrong with me if I can't keep food down." He ran his lower lip against his teeth – because he really did hate it – and clenched his jaw. Two months ago he wouldn't have done this if someone had offered to pay him. Weakness was a very bad thing to him, but not admitting to having one would undoubtedly leave him suffering more than just a slightly deflated ego ever could. Claiming to be fine, standing despite it all – what could he do besides get Lavi killed like that? "If lunch is the same then… I'll… take a break until tonight."

"Yeah… you're the only one who's killed those things before… you have to come if we scout out the graveyard like planned."

"And we _should_ do it tonight. I might be worse tomorrow."

"And the worse you get, the harder it will be for you to fight."

"Exactly."

Lavi was quiet for a time, just holding on by his fingertips, rocking them slowly back and forth in the bathroom stall. After a few seconds he turned his head slightly, hunched so he could press his face to the shoulder of Kanda's jacket. "Did we just… agree on something?" He whispered with a curious upward glance. The chest against his rumbled and the samurai made that sick coughing sound that could only be badly strangled laughter.

"I think we did." Kanda admitted, and somehow the knowledge made the fact that he had _given up_ on his argument that much more bearable. With a shiver and a sigh he leaned them back against the stall wall – which to his surprise was relatively clean and sturdy – and turned his head enough to allow Lavi's chest to press against his without the worry of smashing faces. They weren't so different in height that he could hide himself in the larger man's jacket if he wanted; but there was enough to make him worry for his chin and nose if the redhead decided now was the time to snap back his head for some reason. That didn't happen though. Lavi moved his hands to the middle of the Japanese man's chest and leaned into him, breathing hotly on the side of his neck. The redhead let his hands move down until they caught on the samurai's hips and paused, toying with the fabric of his jacket. When Kanda didn't seem to understand, he licked at the soft skin under his jaw; the hands on his back fisted in his clothes and yanked him backward, but Lavi held on, pressing their hips flush accidentally.

Kanda didn't need this now.

With a growl he pressed Lavi against the opposite wall and held him there, glaring up at him in much the same fashion as he had when he had confessed his true feelings for the younger man. Now though, so very close, he wanted to say something entirely different. "I just threw up and now you're doing _that_ to me? No. Let me rinse my mouth out before you start tempting me with that tongue of yours." He hissed the words, low and almost angry, before he pushed himself away, leaving that one frightened looking emerald eye to watch him go. Maybe it was mean of him to leave the redhead standing in that gray walled space while he made his way shakily to one of the two yellow sinks, but he didn't really think it mattered. Mean was tempting him for a kiss he couldn't give without fear of polluting it with his own vomit.

"Sorry, Yuu-chan…" Lavi called after him, moving out of the stall slowly and standing so he couldn't see the Japanese man's face reflected in the mirror. The bathroom itself was well lit, enough so that he let himself enjoy the shine of it on Kanda's hair without worrying too much about the sour expression that undoubtedly marred his friend's pretty face. Kanda doused his cheeks with cool water as Lavi came to stand beside him, then slurped a mouthful from his palms and spat it out, rinsing the flavor from his mouth. "It's just… odd. It's like – you know how I said I've never really loved anyone? It's like that. I've never really worried either. Never really _wanted_ someone quite like I want you."

Kanda inhaled his handful of water and coughed it out again, turning to the redhead with his wet eyebrows pushed together in an expression of fascination. "Did you just say…"

"Yeah. I want ya. You're hot stuff, Yuu-chan and pretty _nice_ when you're trying."

"Che. You're a moron."

"Just a _little_ harder wouldn't hurt sometimes."

"If you're that willing we might as well make plans to get rid of Moyashi for a while. Maybe we could pawn him for massage oil."

The apprentice Bookman let out a loud, barking laugh and pushed himself away from the wall, moving closer to the samurai as he did. When he had reached the dark haired man he lightly touched his shoulder, which in turn made Kanda turn his curious, wet face in his direction. "Tie him up in the bathroom while we use some of that lavender scented bath goop Lenalee gave him."

"You're seriously trying to plan this?"

"Well, yeah… you're sick, I'm turning into a cat, and who _knows_ what Bookman will hit me with when he finds out I'm… _feeling._ I could very well die if he decides to use Heaven's Compass."

"Right." Kanda rolled his eyes as he shook his wet hands and rubbed at his face with his sleeves. There weren't any towels in the place, not paper or otherwise, and the lack thereof left him with little options as to what to dry with. His coat was rough but it served its purpose in this instance, reddening his cheeks as if with rouge. Lavi liked the look on him a little, but that might have been the fact that he hardly ever got to see the older man blush.

"Really, Yuu-chan!" The apprentice Bookman caught himself and insisted after a moment, but the dark haired man was already heading for the door. "Yuu-chan? What are you—don't walk out we can't talk about this in front of—" As he went on Kanda wandered out of the bathroom, pushing the door open backward with a suggestive, completely uncharacteristic lift of his eyebrows. Lavi jerked his hood up – he didn't even know when it had fallen – and followed the man (he would have thought of him as a tease but that the word seemed impossible to apply to anyone quite as cold as Kanda was most of the time) out of the room on quiet but hurried feet.

He came out to find the Japanese man already halfway through the little diner, Allen having met him there, and the two engaged in a seemingly one-sided conversation, the older man's face pulled into a frighteningly deep scowl, the younger grinning from ear to ear. For a moment, Lavi thought the samurai was going to hit the boy upside the head and stalk away, but he didn't. He followed closely behind Allen until the two of them reached the table, and – awkwardly, the British boy offered him an untouched plate of sausage with a little pout on his lips. By now the redhead was curious himself and started over, raising an eyebrow as he went. He didn't exactly want to call a stop to whatever it was that the two of them were doing – it wasn't as if they talked often anyway. As he watched, a slow, shy hand picked up a fork and offered it to Kanda, who only frowned more deeply, his lips pulled down so low Lavi thought they might start to give him wrinkles.

"No." Lavi heard the word clearly from about a table's length away and paused, pretending not to be eavesdropping.

"Just a bite. If you throw it up I'll… do something horrid. No idea what, we can decide afterward." Allen responded at once with a wave of the fork, taunting. The Japanese man narrowed his eyes at it and tossed his hair over his left shoulder in a long, blue-black wave, a smile the most distant expression from the one on his face.

"I don't feel like eating."

"It's good! I'm full or I'd eat it myself!" Allen gave the plate an enthusiastic little lift.

"No."

"Oh, I see. You're taste buds are too delicate and feminine for a real English breakfast food like—"

"Give me the fork."

The samurai man took the implement awkwardly in his hand and stabbed the proffered meat product before bringing it his lips with the top one raised in disgust. He sniffed it, scowling, and eyed Allen before – much to the British boy's chagrin – he stuck the entire eight centimeter lump in his mouth and proceeded to chew. His eyes fell on Lavi as he masticated it – slowly, thoughtfully – and he motioned to the white haired teen with the fork before pointing to the plate and then to his mouth, as if the actions explained why it was that he had just put _meat_, of all things, in his mouth after puking. The redhead shook his head at the pair and came in closer, curling his nose at the red-black food on the dish that the shorter Exorcist still held.

"What did you feed him?" The question, directed at Allen, was answered with a toothy grin for a moment while Kanda swallowed.

"It's—"

"Salty."

"Black pudding."

"_Ew."_ Lavi shivered, tongue lolling out of his mouth dramatically. Even so Kanda stabbed a second piece of not-sausage and brought it to his mouth with a shrug. The redhead lifted a disgusted lip at him, his voice low. "That's going to liquefy in your stomach and dye everything you throw up on icky brown-red." He warned softly. "Oh _God_, how can you just _eat_ it?"

Kanda shrugged, swallowing his second bite. He set the fork down after a moment before he sank down in the booth again, looking up at the other two and then down at the plate as Allen set it in front of him. He would give it a bit of time before he decided if he should eat more, trusting his stomach to tell him to run if the urge to vomit became too strong to bear. Allen sat across from him and Lavi placed a hand on his right shoulder, running slowly back and forth as if to sooth him.

Two minutes went by in silence. Allen began to toy with the fabric of his gloves.

"Um…" Lavi spoke up at last, carding his fingers almost unnoticeably through the back Kanda's hair. He was being very daring these days with the handholding and now the hair touching, though he doubted anyone had noticed. Most of the people here were too concerned with there own lives to much care about what they saw one person doing to another in a café, and even then he doubted anyone would see Kanda as a man unless he corrected the assumption that he wasn't. The truth of the matter was simple if slightly embarrassing – the more he felt emotionally the more he craved physical contact, and it was true of other things too. Allen, in all of his brotherliness, cried out for a hug silently most of the time, and it was all Lavi could do not give him one, distracted by the slightly more powerful urge to press his fingers to that ebony hair. _Worry_ and _caring_ had something to do with it, he was sure. "Don't you feel gross? Shouldn't you be flinging yourself for the nearest trashcan at this point?" He finished his thought at last, slowing his fingers as they graced the ridges of the dark haired man's spine.

The samurai looked up at him and lifted a lip in a triumphant smirk. "I told you I'm _fine._" He didn't even seem to care about his back.

"Then why did you throw up dinner and then _dry toast_ just now?"

"I don't know, but I'm eating the rest of this."

"Now _I'm_ going to puke…"

-- -- --

The sun was giving him a headache, but it was decidedly better than the freezing rain from only moments before. The weather, it seemed, was as much against them as his stomach had been of late, what with the sudden changes of rain and sunshine and the swiftly encroaching snow clouds not far off. The three of them walked a bit more quickly because of those white streaks in the north of the sky, hoping to have their work at the Rothchild mansion finished before the first white flake could fall.

Kanda pretended not to be bothered by the light. He could feel that Allen was watching him with something like respect in his eyes, though there was something akin to curiosity and concern in there as well, and he refused to squint with the British boy studying him so fiercely. _Why_ the sun would be so deplorably bright and painful was well beyond his understanding, and thinking about it didn't make it any better than it would have been if he didn't, so he eventually gave up and turned his head down slightly, shading his eyes with his bangs. That way it was a bit more difficult to see the roofs of the buildings but he could see the ground right in front of him without having to worry about his face splitting down the middle between his eyes. The cobblestones themselves stood out in sharp relief against the thin lines of black-brown dirt they seemed to be set in, every wet footfall slightly darker than the surrounding drier stone. He never noticed things like that. He never cared to look at the colors of things beyond knowing what they were – it didn't matter to him as long as it didn't make his eyes hurt – aside from red.

A hand slipped into his on the left, toying carefully with his fingertips. For a moment he thought about jerking away – if something happened Lavi would need his right hand – but he decided against it, if Lavi wasn't lying about feelings it would hurt more than a few slivers of a second in reaction time were worth.

He let his fingers twitch softly back in response.

"Ya have a headache?"

The question made him turn his head slightly catching his eyes in the sun and his head snapped back again. Light wasn't supposed to be that bright, ever.

The redhead let out a little sigh and leaned closer, speaking into his ear. "You can go back if you want. We won't think any less of you."

"I'm _fine_."

"Yuu… I'm…" Lavi's hand closed around his as he looked behind them at Allen, who was studying the material of his right glove with forced interest. "Look, you _can_ function like this but if you get worse, what will happen then? We'll come get you before we go look for Eva's grave, I promise. Besides, you should show us where you buried that wolf thing… just in case that _is_ what's doing all of this. Shoulda thought of that earlier." He tapered off and turned his face away again, checking on Allen, before he reached up with his left hand and pressed it to the side of Kanda's cheek, getting a feel for his skin before his palm was batted away with a growl. It was enough, however, and he frowned deeply, the sun on his emerald eye shining a shade darker than jade. _"Please?_ You don't have a fever but you're cold and clammy, and that's not much better._"_

Kanda looked at him from the corner of his gaze and tilted his head forward, further hiding his expression with the shadows. "I didn't ask for your opinion."

"Yuu!"

"I'm not going back."

Lavi made an uncharacteristic face at him – something between a pout and a glare. "Why not?"

"Because."

"That's not an answer."

"I don't owe you one."

Allen let out a gasp at Lavi's left hand suddenly clenched on Kanda's jacket, spinning him sideways into the nearest wall. A woman and her child – the only people close enough to take note of the nearly soundless act of violence – took off a bit more quickly down the way, grappling for each other's hands. The white haired boy stood slightly aside, both hands thrown back, silver eyes wide and focused only on his two friends. The redhead held tightly to the dark haired man's left hand in his right, pressing it against his own chest while he gripped the fabric of Kanda's clothes in his other fingers. The Japanese man looked at him with wide, shadowed eyes for a moment before Lavi shifted, releasing the hand against his chest to grab Kanda's hair and turn his face up to the sun.

Panic and pain washed over the samurai's face, his eyes squeezed themselves shut. His hands, which would have punched the apprentice Bookman in any other situation such as this, buried themselves in the black material of Lavi's coat and fisted, every muscle in his back and shoulders clenched. "What the hell are you doing?!" The question came out in a hiss, angry. Lavi returned the sound in a slightly more catlike way, lips drawn back from his teeth in a snarl.

"If it hurts to close your eyes at the sun what would you do if there was an Akuma flying into it?"

"Lavi—"

"You'd _loose_ it, Yuu-chan! You'd be shot!"

"_Kanke—"_

Lavi's hand gave a tug on Kanda's hair that threatened to snap his bracelet. _"English_. Why do you always _do_ that?"

Allen threw himself forward, catching Lavi by the left arm, and opened his mouth to protest. He didn't know what he would say, how he would fix this, but things couldn't go on this way. Not with his friends. Not with a person he thought of as his redheaded older stepbrother.

He didn't get the chance.

With a sound not unlike a feline version of the word _stop_, Lavi turned on him with enough anger and frustration and worry in him not to notice what he was doing until his fist connected with the poor, abused flesh of the boy's previously split lip. The British boy went down at once, both hands against his lower jaw, booted feet useless beneath him, silver eyes draw into great wide circles. The apprentice Bookman blinked at him, not comprehending, and the dark haired man in his grasp slipped away from him, sinking to the ground with his palms pressed over his eyes. That hadn't been what he wanted.

The hole in the wall, the lump of _warmth_ that had held it open, had turned into something larger.

"Allen… Yuu…"

"Che. Now I won't fucking see any Akuma –flying into the sun or not, _baka!_"

"_At least yuh dun't luhk lihka child a'use hictib."_

"What, Moyashi?"

"_Neber mind."_

"I'm so, so, so sorry…"

"Yeah." Kanda growled without looking up for fear of letting the redhead see the tears that had gathered in the corners of his badly focusing eyes. "I bet you _feel_ sorry."

-- -- --

**Drama in paradise? O.o**

**I discovered using the Encarta World Dictionary that **_**crape **_**is an alternate spelling of **_**crepe**_**. I thought Kanda could put that to use here.**

**Also! If you have a guess as to what's going on with Kanda, that mist-person, or the town, please tell me! It totally makes me happy when people either understand where I'm going with the plot, or have no FREAKIN' idea where it's going – it helps me know what's confusing and what's easy to follow and so forth.**

**And lastly, Allen said "At least you don't look like a child abuse victim." in '**_**I have a swelling, bleeding lip**_**' speech. Heh heh.**

**OH! And Kanda began to say "It has nothing to do with you." Nihongo de, before Lavi went all violent on him.**

**Thanks for reading and reviewing! 8D Seeya next time – which will be sometime next week, being Thanksgiving eats time with family!**


	15. Technicality and Parley

**This one's a **_**little**_** jumpier than the others, but that's what happens when people… never mind. You shall see! Also, it's more building, so… not a lot happens. Maybe you can figure some more stuff out if you haven't already. :3**

**And, I know, I haven't answered a lot of reviews. I tried, but my comp died THREE TIMES and I'm working on two-ish Christmas fics, one fic that may or may not ever be posted, this, TFL, and two original stories. I REALLY don't feel like swimming through the sea of my inbox at the moment. -.-**

**Sorry.**

**I did read them though! And loved them muchly! 8D So great to have you guys…**

**BETA IS STILL ON HIATUS – special thanks to seiyuurabu and sailorlight22 for fixing things in the last chapter. Please do the same again? I love you?**

**Disclaimer: I do not own D. Gray – Man. If I did… Allen would be a bloody naff and a nancy boy, I'm sure. Oh wait. He is! Ho ho ho.**

**Warnings: Lateness! MORE lack of naked! Slow plot! And a slightly shorter chapter for the sake of getting everything… to come out right. Sorry. D8 OH! And slang. If you are confused, just send me the word I will define it. :)**

**-- -- --**

Part Fourteen: Technicality and Parley

The room was very cold and dark, but the black haired man didn't seem to mind in the slightest. The shadows were deep to the point that Allen could hardly see when he helped (though Kanda would have killed him if he used the word) the still nearly blind Japanese man to bed, and walked away again. He left the curtains shut, half glad that he had closed them before breakfast, and moved like a ghost out of the room again, leaving Lavi to finish his business in the bathroom before the two of them made for the Rothchild mansion as a pair. The British boy's face, twice bruised and marred with a bandage over the bridge of his nose, was like something from an ill-fought underaged bar-fight in which he might have used his face to block most of the punches thrown. Neither Lavi nor Kanda seemed to notice.

The hall was quiet without either of them in it.

The moment Allen was gone Lavi removed himself from the bathroom as hurriedly and silently as he could, and made his way quietly to the older Japanese man's side. To his surprise the samurai had laid himself out on the covers, left arm thrown over his face, one booted foot on the floor. The redhead sank down beside his hips and ran a hand through Kanda's hair, pushing his bangs up until his friend looked up at him with one narrowed eye, not quite scowling, delicate features pinched with discomfort. Lavi didn't know what to do with himself and simply teetered sideways, curling against Kanda's chest. The man beside him didn't so much as flinch for a moment while the redhead pressed his face against the nearest warm body part, both hands flat against the bandage under Kanda's jacket.

"What are you doing?"

"_Muraow…_"

"Che."

"I meant apologizing."

The dark haired man sighed and moved his arms down, wincing even in the shadows as he dropped an arm over Lavi's shoulders. "I know why you did it, stupid. I don't hold grudges."

"Liar…"

The hand that Kanda touched the side of the redhead's neck with was shaking slightly, cold against the apprentice Bookman's skin. It followed a slow path from nape to spine and back again twice before it stilled as if too tired to go on. Lavi looked up at him to find Kanda's eyes closed, a blatant expression of pain on his gentle features. "It doesn't matter. You should go." Kanda whispered, unmoving. Regardless of if he felt it or not, a shiver danced its way up his body and rattled his teeth, twitched his fingers on Lavi's coat. The larger Exorcist pushed himself laboriously from the mattress and moved down the length of the bed until he came to the foot the samurai hadn't quite lifted to the bed, and started pulling off its boot. The soft protests that the Japanese man made (mostly in the form of groans) died in his throat after not too long, drowned by a muttering hiss and a sigh – there was no stopping Lavi from picking his shoes off, so what did he gain in wasting the energy on telling him not to?

"Ne… Yuu-chan…." Lavi started slowly, moving to the next boot. He didn't hear even the smallest sound of recognition for the name and went on with a sigh. "Do you really feel _that_ awful? I've never seen you just lay down and not do anything. I mean, unless you were on the verge of bleeding out." His voice was shaky, as if he felt frightened, and the sound might have caused another set of shivers raging up Kanda's spine. "You're gonna… be ok. Right?"

The samurai moved his hands from his face but didn't look at anything, his eyes resolutely closed to the only slightly lit room around them. "Come here." The words marked his second boot thumping to the floor beside the first, a sound that left his head pounding and his eyes squinted even more shut. Little things, the squeak of the bed when the redhead moved to do as he had asked, the sound of breath by his face, fabric wrinkling under the press of hungry palms – they all made him cringe at their loudness. It wasn't like the volume had gone up on the world, but rather like the details had. If he listened, if he really, really listened, he could hear the beating of Lavi's heart in his chest.

"Yuu-chan?"

_Be honest. Even if you'd rather die than say it, just be honest…_

"I've never had anything like this happen to me, so I don't know." Kanda grumbled as Lavi's hands came softly to his chest and began to pull at the buttons of his jacket. The Japanese man let him, knowing that it would be uncomfortable if he fell asleep in the garment, and being currently too apathetic to remove it himself. The way the apprentice Bookman went about things made him feel less weak and more cared for, and the thought almost made him look up and say something terrible – almost.

"You're supposed to reassure me." Lavi breathed from above him. A hand slipped into his jacket and pushed it over his shoulders, at which point Kanda had to move to get his arms out of the sleeves, even if he didn't seem to want to. "You're supposed to say something like… _'Che. Of course I will, fucking moron.'_ and roll on your side and ignore me." With the coat removed, Lavi threw it against the opposite bed, Mugen going with it. His fingers fell to the leather of the samurai's belt and yanked it open, shaking as he cast it aside with a certainty that didn't quite prove how comfortable he was. Kanda let out another of his coughing laughs at the pause of fingers tickling on the top of his pants.

Kanda bothered to crack an eye when he spoke. "I told you I won't lie to you." He growled with a soft sort of shake of his head. There was a hand in his hair, playing softly against his forehead, and he closed his eyes to it before blinking them open again, if only a crack. "And I _will_ be fine. Give me the day before you start freaking out like I'm dying. For all we know it will be gone tomorrow." The words ended in a quiet sigh, a tired sound that the Japanese man didn't quite mean to make, and he lifted his hands to pull the redhead against him a little, trembling all the while. Lavi didn't hesitate to kiss him in that moment, the other man's fingers dancing along the line of his jaw. He unleashed a gentle purr and tilted his head back and the smaller man beneath him broke off the contact but still stroked at his throat, breathing rapidly. "Go."

"But… you're so _cold_…"

"I don't feel cold."

Lavi struggled with the blankest on the bed for a moment until he had worked them over Kanda's body and his own torso, leaving his legs uncovered hanging down to the floor, his too warm arms still next to the Japanese man's too cool body. "Trust me, you're cold. So you'll stay under here and eat something warm and sleep, right? We've got about two hours of sunlight, so you rest for that long." He let himself fall a bit, just until the side of his face pressed into Kanda's chest. The dark haired man didn't respond to the touch. "Hey, that thing in the alley didn't bite you did it?" He inquired into the skin of the nearest collarbone, hands kneading at the mattress. "'Cause I don't think there's any creature in the world who would throw up bread – even carniv—"

The chest under him let out a deep, slow sigh and he knew at once that Kanda wasn't listening anymore. The Japanese man didn't usually nap at all during the day, and yet here he was, dangling precariously from the edge of sleep, hooded eyes loosing focus on Lavi's face. "Lavi…" He mumbled, and his eyes slid shut with the name. "If I _am_ turning into something like you are… _it's totally your fault._" With those words he let out another breath and settled a little easier onto the mattress, obviously set on taking Lavi's advice on rest seriously. He didn't tell the redhead that he was forgiven or that he was in pain, but the concepts were understood between them all the same, more so in the way Kanda let himself be helped than how he glared blindly at things in the light. It was another layer between them, another bond, and feeling it there was enough of a message for both of them.

"I bit Allen, not you." The apprentice Bookman chimed softly in response. "Whatever. Just… get better so we can… you know… be together and stuff."

"Sex fiend."

"Like no other."

"Che."

"Which reminds me, are we – um – still f-friends?" The words got him a little lift of Kanda's right eyebrow, the wording misleading. "Are we… those… other… things?"

"Other things?"

The redhead blushed and Kanda didn't need his eyes to see it. "Like… a c-couple?"

"Are you asking me if I'm your boyfriend?" The older man was incredulous.

"_Eh…"_

"You're such a moron."

"I was thinking m-more like – if this is wrong I'm sorry – l…lo-vers." As soon as he had said it, the face he was looking down at matched the color of his hair, then faded to a hue just between green and white. Before he could protest, or negate the words that had come so stupidly out of his mouth, Lavi felt a hand pressed gently to the cloth over his heart. "Yuu…chan?" He hoped for something. He didn't know what he was hoping for, but he _felt_ the hope in his chest, thick and heavy, more powerful than any sort of fear or anger he had felt before. It made him feel _full_ somehow, light, and the feeling only grew stronger the longer the silence stretched between them.

Kanda's answer was so quiet, Lavi almost couldn't make it out over the pounding of his heart in his ears. "I think your ears are making you stupider."

Lavi didn't laugh like he wanted to, didn't chuckle under his breath when he smiled. Instead he leaned down and pressed his face to the surface of Kanda's chest, listening to the soft thrumming of the older man's heart against his temple, low and strong and encouraging. "I guess I have to love you before we can be lovers, huh? So what are we right now, Carers? That's not even a word. I just… I'm so _worried_ and _scared_ that you won't get better that I feel like… I don't know…" He stiffened at the press of an arm on his spine, fingers touching the back of his hair, meaning more than the touch ever had to him previously. He wanted, more than anything, to stay that way forever.

"Let's sleep in the same bed again tonight." Kanda mumbled against Lavi's hair, warm breath moving gently into the redhead's ears with the words.

"I'd like to."

"Just… one thing at a time."

"Yeah," Lavi nodded into the samurai's chest. "One thing at a time."

"You should go."

"Just a few more seconds." The redhead moved his head forward enough to press his mouth against the older man's, his lips gently parted, eye half closed. Kanda's response was slow at first, almost timid, but Lavi encouraged him, and a slow, curious tongue slipped softly between his teeth. There might have been hunger to it, dulled by sickness and pain, but Lavi did not feel more than a tickle of sexual desire in the back of his mind, reinforced with feline needs. Despite that feeling, overshadowing it, was the desire to keep the samurai as close as he could be, where Lavi could somehow defend him from anything that might seek to cause him harm.

The kiss broke, Kanda's three-fourths hooded gaze stayed on the redhead's drowsy eye. His lips quirked in a downward fashion, discontent but not quite a frown. "If you see a pawnshop, don't hesitate to see if they'll take a twelve year old for a bottle of lube." It came out seriously but his expression betrayed him over time, curving his lips in a silent laugh. Lavi matched the look exactly, though he didn't quite mean for it to happen.

"_I'm_ supposed to be the sex fiend?"

"Che. Doesn't mean I can't try."

"What? You got a secret kinky side that no one's heard of?"

"You have a brain that no one's heard of?"

"Oh, I'm wounded."

"Where?!"

"My ego, Yuu-chan. Geez."

Kanda sighed and closed his eyes, sinking against the mattress, his aura seeming to glare for him. He did not open his eyes this time, nor did he smile, he only reached up with his right hand and touched the side of Lavi's face, cold fingers warmed by the cheek beneath them. For a moment the samurai looked exhausted, if not completely incapable of movement, and then he dragged his eyes open, their dark-blue seeming oddly more like violet in the dim light.

"What, Yuu-chan?" The redhead's gaze flicked from one purplish sapphire to the other, searching.

"Go, _Baka Koneko._ I'll never forgive you if you don't come back by sundown."

-- -- --

Allen didn't like it when Lavi was quiet. Sometimes it was like some kind of creepy nightmarish game of who could be quiet longer, but this was something else – something that made him think that the redhead didn't want to hear the sound of his own voice, too distracted by his feet on the snow covered cobblestones, too lost in this thoughts. It wasn't like him, or at least it hadn't been like him at all prior to the Ark, and seeing him so unwilling to speak now was worse than the wet snow plastering Allen's hood to his hair. The snow wasn't the kind that made for good snowmen and skiing, it was the kind that left him feeling heavy and cold, the kind that left him always wanting a hot bath when he came inside, the gray-white clouds just a shade off from the burdens they deposited on the streets. The frozen mud was the worst of it, but it wouldn't have been so bad with conversation to take up the space between them.

He cleared his throat and kicked a glob of snow from in front of him with a sigh. Things were so strange. Between Kanda having emotions and Lavi returning them and being close friends with them both, his world was tilting swiftly toward its top, especially with his reactions to it all. There were few things that surprised him, but all of this did, and Lavi's silence was no exception to that. It made him tense just thinking about it.

"Lavi…" He said the name without looking; instead trusting his feet to follow the redhead steadily up the dirty avenue, ascending the hill toward the Rothchild mansion at a deplorably slow pace. "How was… Kanda when you left?" When the question was out, hanging in the air, the redhead made a short sound in the back of his throat and his pace became just a little slower – his mind was still on the samurai, even after walking for an hour.

"I don't think he'll be better by nightfall, honestly." The apprentice Bookman answered at length, and he didn't meet Allen's gaze when the boy looked. He walked on, boots leaving gray-brown prints in his wake, fingering the string of his eye patch because he didn't have his headband to fondle at the moment. "He's was almost as cold as a corpse when I left him, and he can't see a meter in front of him in daylight. And he was tired. Yuu doesn't get tired in the day unless he's done something strenuous all night, and he didn't." Lavi shook his head and forced his hand down from his face, gripping it tightly at his side. "Sorry, I can't control my thoughts right now. You ask me something and I might just go on and on like my brain wants to." He explained without a smile or a grin or even a lift to his lips. He was worse off than he was willing to show, Allen could see it. The redhead wasn't, for all he could see, insane, but he wasn't quite himself either.

The white haired teen reached out and gave Lavi's shoulder a little squeeze, just enough to be felt. "He's _Kanda_, Lavi. He was the only one of us who fought a Noah entirely by himself and was conscious at the time the Ark remade itself – Crowley had a little help and passed out, you helped me with Tyki, and… I don't even know if Road was _fighting_ you or what but…"

"Yeah, he's tough, I get it. But how far can that get him? Cockroaches don't die easy but you can still crush 'em with a boot if you try." Lavi winced at his own words and finally graced Allen with a sideways glance, mouth drawn into a half-disgusted expression. A bark of laughter snorted from his nose and Allen echoed it, neither of them too amused by the parallel of Kanda and a cockroach. "I'm just… _worried._ He's so…"

"So?"

"Important." Lavi _growled_ the word rather than saying it. "I know it sounds stupid and completely unprofessional of me, but he is. It makes me feel all strange when I think about him too much, but I feel bad when I don't think about him, yet I don't _want_ to think about him at the same time. Make sense?"

"Not in the least."

"Shit."

The British Exorcist gave another little pat with his hand before he let it fall, looking back toward the road. For all the life in him, he didn't want to talk about love and emotion, but he had to. It was his brotherly duty to be sure Lavi understood what it was that he might – _might_ – be going through. In the back of his mind Allen wondered how things would change if the two in question ended up like _that_. Lenalee would quietly cheer them on, just because she was for virtually any romance that didn't include herself or her brother, Link would likely say something about the church and then ignore it – he didn't care for rules as long as the consequences didn't result in one person in a situation they couldn't deal with. Everyone else who had known the two for years, Komui, Jerry, Reever, would likely shrug the situation off as something that had been suspected for a while despite its only recent fruition.

He wet his lips and cleared his throat again. "Do you think that it might be a possibility that you're in love with him?"

Allen expected a burst of awkward laughter and clap of a palm against his back. He expected to be told he was silly and ridiculous, if not entirely idiotic. Silence filled the space between them.

At length Lavi shook his head, sighing. "They say that when you love somebody, you just _know_ that you love them. Like it clicks. I dunno though. It's just…"

"Just?"

"Part of me thinks he's _so_ hot, but another part thinks he's so _vulnerable_, and I dunno… together I wanna… I _can't_ describe it. You know how _weird_ it is not to be able to tell you what something's like?" Lavi shook his head again, chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip. He didn't seem to know how very odd he looked, what with his eye full of emotion and his lips tugged into a frown. He didn't know how much he looked like a crazy man when he whirled back to look the British boy in the face, eyebrows pushed together in an expression that might have been out of pain or terror. "Is… if I talk about sex will that scar you for life?"

"You mean sex with Kanda?"

"You're right. I'll stuff it."

Allen rolled his eyes, obviously amused by the thought of the redhead thinking him as bashful as that. "Please, I virtually grew up with Cross. As long as you don't go into the long gory details, I think I can handle it. Besides, I want to help you." He threw in one of his perfectly dishonest smiles just to make it seem more truthful and found the redhead smiling back at him with a look that might have been grateful. It didn't make sense for the apprentice Bookman not to see through him, but he supposed everyone was allowed to have an off day – especially when going through something like Lavi's situation. Expecting the redhead to act normal was as stupid as expecting him to break into spontaneous dance.

"Well… thanks." The redhead whispered, and turned his eyes back to the mansion now looming ahead of them like a great gray cloud, ominous but for the angelic gargoyles perched on the line of the fence, carved from smoothed white marble. It was the polar opposite of the church. Everything here was kept in its place, clean, delicate, _perfect_, and the sight of it momentarily stole away Lavi's ability to produce words. The wrought iron gates stood like a weatherworn testament to the power and grace of the woman who had lived there, the two currently leafless fruit trees belaying the money she had been willing to spend on making her home all the more fertile. The house itself was three stories, five windows to either side of the front door, with a large porch decorated with Roman columns of ivory colored wood, matching shudders framed each plane of glass, all of them thrown wide. It was extravagant from the tile roof to the dry marble fountain in front of the mahogany and crystal door. The lawn might have been soft green velvet sprinkled with powdered sugar and – even in the dead of winter – the lavender roses that lined the white gravel way glimmered like amethysts, blooming despite the frost.

But the place was still undeniably creepy.

"_Wow."_ Allen breathed at the building, eyes wandering the line of shrubs that followed the front of the house before turning back behind it out of sight.

"No shit." Lavi agreed softly. "I wonder who owns it now that Eva Rothchild's gone. The place doesn't look shabby at all."

"You best tell me about what you wanted to say before we get too much closer."

"Right." The redhead agreed. They walked yet slower, eyes fixed, and he dropped his voice to a whisper, worried someone might hear him and turn them away even before they had had a chance to say what he intended. The last thing he needed was to have Kanda angry at him for screwing up a mission on top of his _other_ problems. "Ya see, I'm not usually too picky about who I'm willing to get down and dirty with, you know?"

"Yes, I know."

Lavi chose to ignore the exasperated little quip to Allen's tone. "But now that I'm thinkin' about doing _that_ with Yuu-chan, I'm kinda worried what will happen _after_. It's not like – it's not that I'm worried things are gonna be awkward, I'm just worried that he might – or I might – go do that with someone else." His eye had wandered down the building in front of them and now focused on his boot toes as he walked, scuffing his heels in the snow. "I'm worried about what happens after we've… committed. Like what happens if the war ends? What happens if we're caught? What do I do if he's sent on a mission and never comes back from it? What am I supposed to do when he's touching me with that _look_ on his face like I'm the only thing in the room and it doesn't matter how I feel, I can never love him as much as he…" He stopped short, a hand dashing through his hair under his hood, and growled low in his throat. His feet moved a little fast on the cobblestones. "It _hurts._ Whatever's wrong with my head hurts worse than shooting myself in the foot ever could." He finished more to himself than to Allen.

The younger man made a little sound with his tongue on his teeth and smiled wider, shaking his head. "If you really want answers, and you're really worried about what will happen _after_, maybe you should talk to him." Allen offered as certainly as he was able. "You'll never know if you don't communicate with him – assuming he _can_ communicate, I mean. From what I've seen Kanda excels at being a silent lump of humanity who's hardly worth feeding, let alone socializing with. No offense."

"Naw, you don't know him."

"Not as well as _you,_ I'm sure."

"Heh heh."

-- -- --

It was hot. Even after he had stripped off his pants and thrown back the covers, he could still hardly breathe in the stifling air, shivers running rampant through his limbs without seeming to have a purpose. Sleep eluded him after the first hour, his body too uncomfortable for even that quiet pastime. It didn't help that everything was burning up – from the fabric of the sheets to his hair touching the skin of his neck. And everything smelled too strongly, sounded too loudly, felt too close. The soap in his hair, _Lavi_ on his pillow case, food on his hands; he could sense it all without even thinking. He was hungry, also, but he couldn't stand for more than a few seconds without being overcome with nausea from the dim light seeping in the window. Nothing helped. He was completely useless without even the barest idea how to make himself function.

If worst came to worst, he knew he could make himself move by will alone, but he did not want to the deal with the consequences of such an act.

Eventually Kanda tilted his head back against his pillow and just tried to breathe, focusing on staying awake rather than sleeping. He would be easily ambushed sleeping and sick. He didn't have anyone here to wake him.

It was while he was like that, lying on his back thinking looking up at the ceiling, that someone thought they might let themselves into the room without so much as a knock of warning. The squeak of the door sent him flying for Mugen, bare feet slapping loudly on the wooden floor – too far – his knees hit the bed and he fell, his reactions deplorably slow despite his best efforts to make them otherwise. Light, fading toward twilight, flooded the room for a moment and he found himself blindly focused on the space in front of him, a dark figure casting a long shadow against the floor. It moved forward and the door shut, and his eyes attempted to adjust to the suddenly dim room faster even than the three seconds he expected them to need before he could see again.

Mörder stood in front of him with a silver pistol at his right side, scraggly blond hair hanging over his eyes. Kanda's katana waved in front of him as he fought to push himself up, still dizzy from that blast of light, still trembling, and the gun was leveled at his face, Mugen bobbing back and forth in his hands. He didn't know if he'd be able to stop even a normal bullet in his current state, but he was going to damn well try if it came down to it. German murderer be damned.

"What the fuck do you want?" Kanda's voice didn't even sound like his own it was so scratchy. It proved that he had been sleeping, at least, as did the fact he was wearing nothing now but his rumpled underwear. Mörder's eyebrows lifted a little, his dark eyes sweeping the exposed flesh of Kanda's shoulders.

"You are one of them, are you not?" The words were heavily accented, hardly distinguishable, and the samurai found himself wishing that he could just fall into the man's mother tongue like Lavi most likely could. Kanda didn't speak German, knowing only the bare minimum with which to get by if a case came up in a region where the language was spoken, but he had never lamented it until that very moment.

"One of what?"

"The night creatures."

Kanda felt his heart clamp a little and his breath catch, but a smile still spread across his lips all the same. "Che. You've got the wrong one. The cat's out hunting." He blurted without thinking. His brain was too muddled to think.

"What?"

The Japanese man let his sword lower a bit while he tried to convince himself that he was trying to appear nonthreatening, even if the truth was that the weapon was too heavy to hold much longer. The fatigue that hadn't set in before was settling now, though he had the feeling it had more to do with a lack of food than actual sickness. He needed to make a call for something that he wouldn't throw up almost as soon as he had eaten it. "One of my… colleagues was bitten by one of the things out there; he's been turning for a few days now. That's why we're here." He said simply. The pistol in front of him lowered slowly, the wide pair of brown eyes that looked at him growing curious. Mugen slipped until the tip of the blade touched the floorboards. "We came to stop what's happening here and change him back – hopefully before everything goes to Hell the next time the moon is out. And I'll kill you if you try to shoot him before then."

"You do not look capable of killing me."

"Che. You don't look stupid enough to test me."

Mörder shifted on his feet for a moment, indecisive. The boots he wore were composed of animal hide, sporting pale fur and soft leather alike, tying rather than buckling like most in the region. His pants and jacket were a darker material, both of them worn almost to the point of disuse, and the hat he still wore dipped at the front and sides, casting his wide square nose and dark eyes in shadow. His mouth seemed to be the only soft thing about him, pouched slightly in thought, marred by the dashing line of an old scar down to the side of his chin. From where Kanda stood he still looked rugged, but he lacked the kind of dark mystery he had shown in the lobby only a day before. "I see." He said at last, and the gun disappeared beside another on his right hip. "If that is truly the case, allow me to offer a bit of advice to you, being you have the smell of one of _them_ about you: stay away from the graveyard." Mörder narrowed his eyes, large eyebrows furrowed, before he took a step forward, which forced Kanda to lift Mugen again, waving it half-blindly in front of him.

"Why should we?" Kanda's hands were shaking on the pommel.

"If you stay close too long you won't be able to leave. I've seen it."

"Why should we trust…" He couldn't do it anymore. With a sideways lurch and a lowering of his blade, Kanda careened into the bedside stand, hardly able to catch himself on his right hand against the wall. Mörder was beside him in an instant, a hand on his shoulder, and the Japanese man forced the edge of his katana to the man's throat, unable to speak the threat he meant to voice.

Up close, Mörder was quite a bit younger than Kanda had assumed, perhaps in his mid to late twenties by the paper thin wrinkles around his eyes. The scar on his chin danced crookedly up the left side of his face and across his nose before it turned away from his eye and shot upward, ending in a starburst at his right temple. For a moment the samurai contemplated making a matching mark on the other side if the blond didn't step aside in a moment.

"Are you ill?"

"I'm _not_ fucking ill. It's a migraine." Kanda pretended to be sure in that statement. If it was a migraine it was the king of all that had come before, to say the least of the pain and the sensitivity. "Get out."

"Have you taken anything for it?"

"I throw up everything I swallow. _Leave._"

Mörder did the same thoughtful rock on his feet before he shook his head and laid a hand on Kanda's wrist, gloved so the German man couldn't feel the coolness of his skin. "I… apologize for bursting in on you with my gun drawn. If you are here to stop the things that plague this town then we are not enemies. I did not mean… to threaten a comrade." As he spoke the blond man gave a little pull on the samurai's arm that brought him teetering away from the nightstand and slumping into the bed, Mugen clattered from his fingers.

"I don't need you to—"

"If I had not come you would not have gotten up and would not be in as much pain as you are now. It is only fair that I see you back to how you were before I came."

"Che." Kanda couldn't argue with that, but he could see better than he could even a moment ago, and figured that he'd be more or less capable of travel by the time the sun was down entirely. He just needed food for now, something hearty and full of iron that he wouldn't throw up. "Fine. If you have to apologize just grab me some black pudding if they have any down stairs."

"Black pudding?"

"It's a gross English sausage. My stomach doesn't mind it so much." Kanda was sitting rather heavily on the bed before Mörder turned away with a tiny little frown tugging at his lips, an expression that might have been real concern written across his face. The Japanese man wondered for a moment if he had been this pleasant when talking to Lavi before, but decided that he wouldn't bother contemplating the interaction: some people just acted differently in private than they did in a room crammed with half-drunk loiterers.

The blond man moved slowly away, skirting around Mugen as if he knew better than to touch it unless given permission. "I will return before sundown."

-- -- --

"I hope he's ok…"

"The sooner we're done, the sooner we know."

"It's twilight already."

Allen reached out and placed a hand on Lavi's shoulder, the same as he had before. He was only mildly surprised that the redhead turned around and hugged him, hunching almost small enough that they fit together. Shyly the British Exorcist wrapped his arms around Lavi's ribcage and ran his hands gently up to the apprentice Bookman's shoulders, and proceeded to drum with his fingers ever so lightly against them. "We're right here, Lavi, you're just making Kanda wait longer by clinging to me." He felt a shudder run through them both and frowned, not understanding, before he pulled the redhead a little more tightly against him, allowing Lavi to cuddle standing. "What's wrong?"

"I've been… having emotional trouble since yesterday. Kind of like what happened on the Ark only… backward." Lavi admitted into the smaller man's coat, eyes resolutely shut to the yard in front of him. "It's all been around Kanda but just now – when you touched me – I kinda thought of you like you really _are_ my kid brother or something. This might sound really freaky and you may not get it, but you should still know… you're… meaningful to me. Really. And you're so _nice_ that it's creepy sometimes. So just…" Allen gave the redhead's ribcage an extra strong squeeze and smiled, aware of the little sound of a purr starting in the back of his friend's throat.

"I understand, Lavi. I care about you, too."

"I dunno if I should feel happy or cheesy…"

"Neither. You should feel loved."

Lavi made a different sound this time – almost frightened – but didn't let go of Allen's coat. "I don't even know what that means." His admitted words weren't lost on the younger Exorcist, who stiffened a bit and pushed him gently away, stroking at the back of his coat.

"Come on," Allen gave another little tug that the redhead understood the meaning of and the two parted, though Lavi left his hand on the smaller boy's shoulder a little longer than was absolutely necessary. With an almost childishly sweet smile, the white haired teen gave the redhead's back a little rub before he cocked his head to the side, a devilish grin taking his lips. "We have a woman to investigate and, for all we know, a Kanda to save."

"What do you mean _a_ Kanda?" Reassured, Lavi reached out for the wrought iron and glass door knocker and gave it a savage bang, cringed. "As far as I'm concerned there is only _one_ Kanda in the world – if there were two the planet would blow up from all the angry-sexiness being in one area at the same time." His face settled into an expression of jollity and he gave the British boy a sneaky little wink to go with it, but the eyes looking back at him weren't as disgusted or horror-stricken as he had assumed they would be: Allen was grinning that fake grin at him, all teeth and round cheeks in sunlight.

"If there were two Lavis the world would wither in a fit of sexual frustra—" The door gave a click and a creak as it was pulled inward, a round little girl's face peered up at them from below the rather elegantly set door handle. Her strawberry blonde hair hung in soft little curls to her eyebrows and plunged down around her shoulders, mingling with the pale green ribbons of her dress. She smiled at them and Allen held his tongue, returning the look just as brightly. "_Hello_, we're—"

"_Strangers!"_ It was a boy's voice that sounded from behind her and she immediately scowled at it, her lower lip protruding dangerously while her right eye narrowed in irritation. A long fingered hand came to the door above her head and wrenched it open, casting a small patch of red carpet and the speaker into sight. He was head and shoulders taller than the younger girl with a smattering of freckles across both cheeks and nose, matching hair, a squarer face and narrow set eyes, just the color between blue and gray. Those faded looking crystals widened at the two touching Exorcists until they found Allen's and paused just long enough for curiosity to flare in the back of his gaze. From there he looked first at the curse mark, then at the uniform, and finally blinked at the crest and tassel on the slightly taller boy's chest.

"Naw, we're not strangers 'less we got candy, and we didn't bring any." Lavi chimed from beneath his hood. The little girl was still looking at him with keen interest, one hand on the door, the other wrapped around her supposed older brother's brown trouser-clad kneecap. "We're from the Black Order and we're lookin' for anyone who can tell us about Eva Rothchild." He halted and Allen stealthily lifted his elbow to meet the redhead's ribcage and goad him on, so Lavi stammered, pretending to have had to clear his throat. "We might be able to stop what's happening in this crazy little town, if you'll help us."

"The other man who came, scraggly chap, he said the same thing, too!" The girl blared rather loudly before her brother could find air to speak. At once he was glaring at her with his cold eyes, but she went right on, expression falling only slightly. "He weren't with no Order though. And he wasn't very polite neither. Burpin' and blowin' off like there's no tomorrow with his bloody_ 'pardon me'_ and _''scuse my rudeness'_ every ten se—"

The boy leaned just enough to slide his hand over the girl's mouth and pull her against him, stepping back from the door. He forced a smile as he moved back, speaking from the side of his mouth as he moved. "Now that's not very nice, Wendy. When Aunty Rose hears that you opened the door to strangers _and_ used bad grammar on them, cursed, _and_ talked about such unladylike things as those, she'll give you a licking so bad she'll go right out and get bladdered just to forget it." With that mumbled he forced his smile wider and dragged Wendy yet farther away, opening the door wider. "You'll have to forgive my sister; she's… a bit untrained in the conduct of callers. I am Hilary and this is Wendy. We're Eva Rothchild's children."

"_In law!"_

"_Step­_children." Hilary amended at his sister's insistence. "And you are…"

"Allen Walker," The bearer of the name chimed at once, offering an enduring smile.

"Lavi Bookman… I guess." The redhead half groaned as if distracted. The British Exorcist shot him a glance and found him fiddling with the fabric of his hood, irritated, ears almost obvious beneath the protective fabric. At length he pushed his hand beneath the material and scratched fearlessly for a second before he seemed satisfied. He looked awkwardly between the three staring at him and forced his face to blossom into a friendly smile. "Sorry, just a bit of a headache." He lied grinningly. Allen gave him a warning glance that he didn't need and Hilary wordlessly invited them inside, a strange expression of interest on his boyish features.

Wendy struggled until she had herself free of her brother's grasp and immediately trotted to Allen, the folds of her white and green skirt waving in the movement. Before the lecture could start, however, she reached out and took a firm hold of his left hand, smiling cheerily at him. "Gottschalk is ill today, so you'll have to come with me to the study so Hilary can serve you tea and I can find Aunty. I'd make it for you but I'm too li'le." She explained with a tug on Allen's fingers. He moved forward a step, astounded by her strength, and she tried to walk on before she stopped to smile once more at Lavi. "Not bleeding likely Aunty'll go barmy if you need something for your head, so I'll ask for you."

"Wendy!"

"Er… I mean…"

"It's ok." Lavi waved nonchalantly, dismissing the boy's look of utter horror. "Where I'm from '_bleeding'_ isn't any more of a curse word than '_yellow'_. Besides, I think my head's getting better already! Uh…" A rosy blush spread suddenly across his face, thoughts of Kanda and the alleyway and what had happened there filling his mind so suddenly he couldn't shake them away for a moment, and he tilted his head back a bit into his hood. Puns, it seemed, would be the death of him.

Luckily the children didn't seem to notice as they turned away from the door into the interior of the house. The apprentice Bookman followed after them, Allen dragged at Wendy's side, and together the four made their way down the long red carpet, passing darkly colored stone floors and soaring gothic buttresses, romantically painted angels, and green velvet curtains. The foyer had no furniture, and from it the house seemed to bloom into a symmetric maze of rooms and hallways, lit by old gaslights and open windows. The redhead studied the twin stairwells that parted around a larger room exactly across from the door and frowned: even if the house was large and expensive, it seemed there was only one butler to handle all of the dusting and sweeping of the rugs and they had suffered a little for it. The group turned left, into a side room and he pushed the thought from his mind, too intent on the gentle splendor of the well kept study to think too much about what the house couldn't afford.

The study sported a large, lit fireplace and a number of nearly overburdened bookshelves, row upon row of badly dusted red and blue spines almost unreadable in the dim light. And there, curled on the floor with its great yellow-green eyes locked on Lavi's face, was the family feline, staring at the redhead with all of the kind of curiosity cats are know for.

"Allen," He spoke from the corner of his mouth, his feet seemed nailed to the spot for a moment. "Stop me."

-- -- --

The sun sank below the horizon slowly, drowning in the line of the mountains in a pink and orange splash against the snow clouds. The light on the wooden floor turned a bloody red color shot through with gold, then faded to a neutral gray-brown, cool and soft in the evening light. Not far from the pale puddle of moon glow, Kanda shifted against the covers, breathing in slow, deep breaths, eyes half-hooded narrowed at the darkest rafter of the room. He could see the color of it regardless of the dimness, and the knowledge that that was the case drove him to narrow his eyes further, focusing on a single knot in the wood above him. The pain was gone, as was the dizziness, but the world was still far too close to his face to be normal, too bright and fresh for night. Too _alive_.

He had eaten and the food had stayed down, but it didn't much matter. He still felt hungrier than he had since he had fought for three days consistently in Italy, and then he had had a nearly mortal wound and massive blood loss to distract him. _Here_ he had nothing. _Here_ he was being forced to rest, left to his boredom and his thoughts. Being idle made him feel useless.

Part of him wanted to decide that bed rest, no matter how much he supposedly needed it, was pointless when the only thing diverting his attention was a constantly empty feeling stomach. The logical part of his mind however, informed him that while he felt fine, his sensory perception was off, breathing was something he had to think about, and his heart seemed to be pumping abnormally slowly, as if sleep had somehow bled into the waking world. There was also Lavi. If he climbed out of bed, dressed, strapped on Mugen, did his hair, and took a single step out of the door, the redhead would kill him. It wasn't a matter of following the younger man's advice either, the apprentice Bookman was _worried_.

It shouldn't have mattered that Lavi was _worried_ about him. It wasn't like Kanda really gave a damn what the redhead thought.

But that he wanted Lavi happy. And close to him. And so many, many other things. Like not mad at him and naked.

"It's dark, _Baka_." The samurai grumbled into his pillow as he threw is arms up, draping them over his face. "So why the fuck aren't you here?"

A hair-raising howl sounded as if in answer to his inquiry.

--- --- ---

**It didn't end QUITE where I wanted it to, so this is more like a prologue to next chapter, really. :)**

**I can't type a German accent fery vell zo I decided nott to inzult my German readers. Bitte vergib mir! Ich spreche Japanisch und Spanisch befahrbar, aber nicht Deutsch!**

**I hope you like it! Thanks for putting up with my slow fail! 8D Reviews are love! **


	16. Alignment and Predilection

**I wrote basically this entire chapter listening to the Macross Frontier soundtrack that my lovely friend Mel got for me for Christmas, so if this comes out EPIC, it's HER FAULT.**

**I do not own D. Gray – Man.**

**This is a long chapter. To make up for the last one.**

**WARNINGS: Gore? Horror? Supermassive!plot movement and a lack of naked? There shall be naked soon, I promise…**

-- -- --

Part Fifteen: Alignment and Predilection

"Lavi—"

The redhead turned to him and cocked his head to the side, eye narrowed dangerously, and lifted his lip over his teeth with a hiss. Wendy clenched at Allen's hand, a gasp in her throat, so the British Exorcist had to shake her off, preparing himself for whatever violent act the apprentice Bookman was going to commit. Lavi's ears were pressed back against his hair under his hood, back hunched as if it would somehow make him look larger; hands lifted half way between his face and his hips with slack wrists. With wide eyes Allen pushed his own hood off and reached for the redhead, taking a gentle hold of his shoulders.

"Lavi, what's happening?"

"_I dunno…"_ Lavi responded softly, eye unblinking, and fingers drawn into claws. "But I don't like it…"

"Stay calm, breathe, um… um… is it the cat?"

"_Part _of it's the cat, don't ask me why I'm gonna – stop touching me. Please. I'll go for your throat." With the words the redhead took two steps back, which brought him closer to the feline in question but out of Allen's hands. Regardless of how bad of an idea it seemed, Lavi pushed his hood down, which in turn made the already stunned children produce loud sounds of surprise at his ears. He couldn't say that he cared. There were too many signals, not all of them human, firing in his head at once. It reminded him of standing on the bridge outside of the Order, waiting for the train.

Wendy reached for the apprentice Bookman and Hilary tugged her back, obviously frightened. "What… why does he have… who are…" The questions didn't come out of his mouth properly, none of them willing to finish. The blond boy's freckles stood out against his cheeks as he paled, white knuckled hands fisted on his sister's shoulders, gray-blue eyes disbelieving. "What's—"

"Unhand me! He wants to be petted!" Wendy cut him off with a swift wooden soled shoe to his toes.

The cat by the fireplace meowed.

Everything happened so quickly, Allen almost couldn't follow it. Lavi collapsed, both hands pressed to his face, Wendy broke from Hilary's grasp and moved at once to the redhead's side, reaching for his ears. Hilary made a sound of denial and the cat launched itself at him, fangs bared, dark fur bristling. And then the cat stopped, caught between Lavi's outstretched arms, claws buried harmlessly in the thick fabric of his coat. Wendy, strawberry blonde curls shadowing all but her smile, had her right hand between the man's ears, stroking at them, while the apprentice Bookman's expression reflected indifference to the touch. Hilary stood a bit removed from the ordeal, mouth open at the pain in his foot, slightly hunched and shaking. He was staring at the display before him with such a skeptical expression Allen had to fight the urge not to blurt out everything exactly how he knew it.

"_Hrrr…" _It wasn't a human sound that came out of Lavi's mouth, _"Nya ao. Myuu. Hrrr…" _As he went on his hands let go of the captured feline and he smiled, face turned up at Allen. The cat picked it's claws one at a time from Lavi's coat, seemingly soothed. "_Mew rao."_ The redhead cocked his head to the side, ears perked, and Wendy made an absolutely delighted sound from beside him.

"Lavi… please tell me that you aren't stuck speaking cat." Allen whispered into the otherwise silent room.

The apprentice Bookman furrowed his brow as if in thought and cleared his throat, then turned his face down to the cat that still pressed itself to his chest. "Was I doing that again? Sorry… I just kinda… oooh, everything _looks_ funny… I mean, my head hurt for a second there, but _gees_, what happened? Why's it so _bright?"_ Lavi blinked rapidly and turned his face up at Allen, squinting. The white haired Exorcist seemed to glow in the light of the fire, his hair reflecting every ray of light that fell across it. The red of his curse mark was more vibrant, the silver of his eyes colder, yet not everything was different than he was used to: details were the same. Definition and sharpness somehow remained intact.

Allen touched the side of Lavi's face and tilted it upward, leaning in to look at his face with eyebrows pushed together in concentration. Before the redhead could ask what exactly he was doing, the British boy tilted his face toward the fireplace a bit, just until his eye was in the light, and then moved it back again, frowning. "That is terribly creepy, Lavi."

"What is?" Lavi responded at once, not understanding.

"You know how cat pupils go from exceedingly tiny vertical slits to great bit round black circles?"

"Yeah."

"Your eyes are doing that without the vertical slit part."

"Huh?"

Allen nodded, worried expression blossoming across his face. "Your pupil is about two times too large… the color almost disappears… that's _creepy_, Lavi. We really need to cha—"

The loud thump of Hilary hitting the floor interrupted him. The three of them, Wendy a bit more slowly than the other two, turned to watch the boy lift a shaking finger and breathe out a slow, horrified word. "Bitten?"

-- -- -

After thinking about the sunset and wondering about what to do with himself, Kanda decided that it didn't matter if Lavi killed him – he needed to go out. He needed, at least, to find something to eat that wouldn't leave him feeling hungry and heavy like the last dish of black pudding had. Sitting in silence wasn't making him better, whereas eating potentially could. Thus on uncharacteristically clumsy feet Kanda made his way to the bathroom, intent on scrubbing a few layers of skin from his face and neck to improve his mood as well as his level of cleanliness in a single go. The moment he flipped on the bathroom light he winced a little, unaccustomed to it, but the yellow electric glow didn't hurt like the sun had, didn't cause him to feel dizzy or double over in agony like he had expected it might. Instead he caught his reflection in the mirror and blinked, dark eyebrows pressed together in an expression of slight disbelief.

If Allen had been standing next to him at that moment, he might have thought the boy tan.

_Pale_ wasn't the word for it in his mind – he looked sick really – and the dark bluish purple hollows under his eyes didn't do anything to help him. His eyes, usually a color like sapphires over canvas, had faded to an inky black, the whites bloodshot as if he hadn't slept in days. Curiously he leaned in a bit and placed his left hand on the mirror, squinting at his own reflection with a hollow sinking feeling in his gut. The position tilted his head up a bit toward the light, which made the entire bathroom seem brighter for an instant and caused his pupils to flash a strange color like greenish red. He stepped back, blinking away the sight with the smallest shadow of confusion covering his features. As soon as he recovered he looked again, to be sure that he hadn't hallucinated it, and stiffened only a little when he watched the light bounce once more from his retinas, illuminating the bathroom in more detail and giving his face a completely inhuman, feral quality. It was more than odd seeing his own changed eyes look back at him the same dog's might, almost glowing when he flipped off the light.

So he was turning. He _had_ to be turning. This proved it.

_Nothing bit me. Not even Lavi. He… put his mouth on me, sure, but he didn't bite me…_ Kanda thought, turning on the taps with a frown. The water came out cold but not too much so and he doused his face and neck in it, refreshing him, before he wiped himself off with the nearest sinfully plushy towel. He went over the last few days, then the last two weeks in his mind while he went about his task, trying to find a moment when someone or something had taken a chunk out of him.

He couldn't think of anything but for the moment when he had had his fingers tangled in the apprentice Bookman's hair and Lavi's teeth had just barely brushed the base of his length, more teasing than aggravating or painful. That wasn't a bite was it? If it was a bite, they were going to have a very tough time explaining things to Komui.

Kanda could imagine it.

'_I've been infected with the same Innocence as Lavi.'_ He would say, trying to keep his voice neutral.

'_How did it happen?'_ The scientist would ask back, completely incompetent as always.

'_He was giving me head and accidentally scraped my dick with his teeth.'_

No. He didn't want to know what Komui would say to that. It _had_ to be something else.

The room was still dark when he came back to it, but he could make out every color and detail of it with only a glance. That was nice, if not for the strangeness of it. The sound of his feet on the floor seemed less intrusive to him now, less like thunder, less like rocking himself on a sea of nausea, and the smell of _Lavi _that remained around the bed served only as an intimate reminder of how they would sleep tonight, curled together. The details were all much more vivid than they had been, but his brain was starting to comprehend them as he took them in, rather than killing him with a monstrous headache like before. For all he knew the symptoms he had suffered from the sunlight hadn't been caused by the light at all, but rather how much _more_ he could see in it, how much of _everything_ there was.

He wondered if it was anything like how Lavi saw the world, what with his supposed spectacular eyesight and all.

"Che. This is the last fucking thing I need," Kanda grumbled at his shirt as he pulled it over his head, the tight black fabric clinging to his arms on the way down. Why it was that the thing had to be a vest crossbred with a turtleneck he didn't understand, but it was better for fighting than the shirt he had been wearing early, and black took bloodstains much better. "Turning into God knows what while you're out there after sundown. Retard. You can't fight them. Found that out last time." Somewhere along the line his verbal complaints had changed targets slightly, but the switch didn't bother him as he fastened his belt to his pants then tugged on his coat, open for the time being because closing it would leave him too warm to function.

He had every right to share his thoughts on Lavi's stupidity with the redhead, if he chose to do that without the apprentice Bookman in the room with him, it kept them both happier.

After a final sweep of the room with his eyes he slung Mugen over his shoulder, grabbed the room key, and paused, formulating something of a plan to follow for the next few hours. Finding food was a must – perhaps he could find whatever was _in_ black pudding and just eat the ingredient that was currently sustaining him rather than that _and_ whatever was making him feel sick – as was eventually finding Lavi. From there he assumed it was safe to follow their original plan, as long as he got out of the graveyard before the sun rose.

With a nod and a determined expression, the Japanese Exorcist made his way into the hall.

-- -- --

"Don't say it like it's an unholy disease Hil, not my fault it happened."

"_Ee! Fuzzy!"_

"Stop touching him!" Hilary blurted, but he couldn't stand to make his ardor known to his younger sister. He sat exactly where he had fallen, the other three in front of him, the cat curled casually between them, _his _cat, really. Wendy shot him a glare and went right back to touching Lavi's ears, absolutely mystified by how they twitched and moved under her fingers. The more Hilary watched them the more he worried that letting the two Black Order members in had been a mistake.

Allen waved his hands at the younger boy, a friendly smile taking his features. His eyes, nearly shut with this expression, shined nearly gold in the firelight. "Two weeks ago Lavi was bit by one of those…things out there. Just a few days ago he grew the ears and started to attack shiny things and hiss at people – he hasn't… um… _purposely_ bitten anyone or done anything _bad…_" The British Exorcist let that line of argument die off and moved to the next that he had in mind, hoping to settle everything with a lack of violence. "And this is the reason we're here – to change him and everyone else like him back to normal."

Hilary visibly digested that bit of information. He looked at Lavi, who looked back at him with his left eye draw into a perfect circle, ears turned down ever so slightly as if he wanted something.

"Please don't kill me?"

"But _how_?" The boy demanded, pushing himself up onto his knees. "Everyone else… April, Simon, Edgar, Rachel – they all just _changed_. Why are you… how come you're still mostly human?"

Lavi looked at Allen and then to Hilary, blinking rapidly, an idea forming in his head. "Who're they?"

"They were friends…" Wendy answered for her brother. "Until the shadow came."

"The shadow?"

"It took Michael and Ursa away." She went on, and turned her eyes uncertainly to her brother before she cocked her head to the side, chewing her lip. Lavi guided her around in front of him, her still round face turned down so her chin was tucked against the bodice of her dress as if in fear. "We think it did. They went to the graveyard and didn't come back. April, Edgar, Rachel, Simon, Hilary, and myself—"

"That's incorrect gram—"

"_My bloody self_, went to look for them an—" She stopped short at the touch of her brother's hand on her head, stroking through her curls. The story, it seemed, was something they had kept as a secret between them, something they didn't talk about. The details were missing, but the redhead was piecing things together in his head as he listened, assuming that he had already had contact with _the shadow_ in the alleyway with Kanda. The prospect made him want to shiver despite the roaring fire beside them. "The shadow got them." Wendy concluded softly.

Hilary shook his head and took up the story, drawing the girl against his chest. "April didn't believe in werewolves, and neither did Simon, so they came up with the idea to go search the graveyard after Michael and Ursula disappeared there. But when one came out, they… they didn't run like the others. Simon fell and I couldn't see him, but when he came up again he was… part wolf or something. He bit April in the leg. There was…"

"Blood. A lot of blood."

"And then the shadow covered her and she turned into one too, only… different. I'd never heard of a werewolf with wings before but—"

"They all changed. They all bit each other and there was more blood. None of them… none of them got away…"

"I picked up Wendy and ran. I ran as fast as I could until I got out of the churchyard." Hilary finished with a lowering of his eyes, perhaps feeling like a coward. "They didn't follow."

Allen turned to Lavi and blinked at him when he saw the gears already turning behind the apprentice Bookman's expression. What the redhead had gotten out of the story he couldn't imagine beyond the fact that the Innocence itself had to be in the churchyard like they had thought – protected by what sounded like either a spirit that had somehow been bound to it, or an accommodator unlucky enough to have a power that affected other people rather than itself. Whatever the case, however, they had the location for sure now, and that gave him a little bit of hope despite what had transpired regarding Kanda.

He looked down at Hilary with an apologetic look in his eyes, prepared to tell him that everything would be taken care of and his story had helped more than he could know. If only they could dig up his stepmother's grave…

"Why did they change at once and you…" Hilary didn't get the question out of his mouth, a wave of his hand covering what he meant to say. Lavi didn't seem to register what he was asking and he leapt to his feet, a terrified expression on his face, ears pressed flat against his hair.

Allen waited for him to speak, caught between being the comforter and asking what the apprentice Bookman knew.

"Yuu-chan…" Lavi blurted in Allen's direction. "The shadow thing, when it found us in the alleyway, it might have…"

"What?" Allen asked, not following.

"You said that not everyone who's bitten changes, so what if it's _not_ biting that passes it on?"

"You mean…" The white haired Exorcist furrowed his brow in the effort to understand. "If the shadow changes people somehow without biting? If it can do that sort of thing with just a touch?"

"Then it might have gotten to Yuu." Lavi concluded for him.

"Did it ever get _you?" _Allen questioned. He didn't want to be excited about figuring something out only to have logic negate their theory, but the look on Lavi's face allowed him to hope. He watched the redhead for a moment, finding it difficult to swallow.

"Might've. I don't remember much after that thing bit me."

"And… if that is the case, then… the thing with the toast, and the sunlight… what could Kanda be turning into?" Allen half-demanded, but Lavi was already moving toward the door, Wendy trotting to keep up with him as he made his way through the house from memory. The British Exorcist struggled to keep up, Hilary not two steps behind him, thinking that he would be lost if he was left alone in a place this big suddenly, especially with such important thoughts distracting him.

Lavi turned back and his eye reflected the light oddly, like a cat's might, orange and green and yellow in the semidarkness. "I don't know, but he can't be alone when it happens. He'll think he's dying if he hasn't figured it out yet. He'll do something stupid."

"Who's Yuu?" Wendy asked just as Lavi jerked opened the door and stepped into the night, not the smallest glimmer of sun or starlight in the sky above the mansion. The clouds blocked the moon but that didn't mean it wasn't there, bigger than it had been the night before.

"My… friend." He answered a bit awkwardly. "We'll be back tomorrow, maybe. Just… I _have_ to go. You coming, Allen?"

"Right behind you."

-- -- --

"Black pudding?" Jill cocked her head to the side, brown eyes blinking at Kanda as if she had never seen him before. Knowing how stupid she was, it wasn't likely that she remembered feeling his chest for breasts really, so he wouldn't complain to her face about her short term memory problems. He would sit at the bar and pretend to be interested in the glass of whiskey she had given him in order to _'warm his blood a little'_ and _'get some color back in his cheeks.'_ He wasn't one for drinking, especially not without reason, but he tried it for the sake of putting something in his gut. If he threw it up on her apron it would be her fault, not his.

The room was a great deal emptier than it had been when they had arrived, even Mörder missing from the thinned crowd that stayed after sunset. They were all drinking rather than eating, but for a young looking man with distinctly feminine hands eating warm pea soap in the corner. Kanda could _smell_ the peas and had to fight down a retch when he thought about it.

"Yes, black pudding." He nodded, bringing the tumbler to his lips without taking anything out of it. The smell dimmed his nausea a little. "What's in it exactly?"

The bartender pretended that the spot in front of his stool needed to be polished. "Are you au fait with blood sausage?"

"_Iie."_ He answered with a scowl. The French saying made perfect sense to him, but he didn't see why she had to use it in the first place.

"Well…" Jill's brow furrowed. "The kind we have here is mostly lard and pork blood, eggs, cream, and bread crumbs. There are lots o' ways to make it though. They all have blood and lard in them for the most part, but for those people who think lard is _bad_ for you – nitwits – they use something else. No idea what." She reached out and pushed the glass of alcohol toward his chin, leaning heavily on the counter as she did. He hadn't noticed that his hand was dangerously close to spilling the contents down the front of his jacket and so hefted it again, narrowing his eyes at her. She urged it toward his lips a little. "On the house means drink it, not put it _on_ the house." She smiled at him softly and let herself fall to the floor again, returning to the clean spot in front of him.

Kanda didn't think about what he was doing, he threw back the glass and put it down again, the burn strangely satisfying in the back of his throat. It wasn't to please her. It was to get the glass out of his hands before he dropped it. He wasn't thinking beyond what he _needed_ to do at the moment – if he thought too hard he would stop what he was doing and have to crawl back up to the room disgusted with what he was turning into – he did not have options. He needed to move while he could. "Is there a butcher shop near here?" His body was turned toward the door in an effort to keep himself looking casual.

"Not an _open_ one, no."

"Doesn't need to be open." _I can fucking pick one shitty country lock, idiot._

"Out the door to the left. Three shops over. You can smell it if yo—" The blast of cold, snowy air that usually accompanied the door opening cut her off and she turned her head, curious if one of the creatures of the night had finally wandered in at the lights. Instead she saw a line of dark hair waving after a leaving patron and a flurry of flakes came inside as the door closed again. And when she turned back to the woman she had been talking to, or thought she had been talking to, was gone.

-- -- --

The snow was drier than it had been earlier, but so thick Lavi wished very, very hard that he could see with both eyes at the moment. He could function fine, that was true, but another night-vision enabled eye would have facilitated running in the dark like nothing else he knew besides sunlight, and he didn't think wishing for the sun to rise would help Kanda or himself with anything after it was up too high. He made it halfway down the hill, moving at a dead run, before something lurched at him from the shadows and caught the sleeve of his coat. With a half screamed apology he tripped and the two of them slid a good three meters together before he came to rest on top of his victim, knees pressed to the cobblestones, someone else's torso between his thighs. There were too strong fingers on his hips at that point, and a snarl not far from his face, foul smelling breath brushing against his chin.

The man he had knocked over was all wrong, he realized. The creature lacked a left eye and most of its lips, three teeth on the left side and a goodly portion of its right nostril – but it still growled at him and tried to cast him off, teeth snapping at the sleeve of his coat.

"_Oh, shit!"_

"Lavi!" Before the redhead could even react to his name a familiar looking sword blade severed the head from the creature beneath him, leaving the lower jaw connected to a struggling, blind, deaf body. Allen's blade swept through Lavi's torso as it came down again, this time hacking the moving corpse in half, putting an astoundingly dry end to its fighting. The sound it made, somewhere between a scream and a moan, left Lavi feeling a bit sick to his stomach. It was still a human body, dead, undead, or otherwise.

Allen helped him to stand using an elbow, the white fringe of his Innocence seeming to glow in the moonlight, the black cross emblazoned across his sword dyed a brownish red with old blood. No words were exchanged for a moment as Lavi pulled his hammer from the holster on his thigh and placed his back to the younger Exorcist's, searching the snow for any other undead that might be lurking out of sight.

"This may not be the time for it but—" Allen reached out with a belt of white Innocence and pulled something Lavi hadn't seen (which was bad in and of itself) close enough to cut to bits the way he had the first animated corpse on the ground behind them. "For me to be able to fight them like this…"

"They're evil." Lavi finished for him, nodding. "My ears are freakin' on fire, but I don't think you did that."

"Couldn't've. I can't do anything to Innocence."

The conversation came to a momentary halt, a growl of perhaps hunger and anger on the apprentice Bookman's right, nearly blindsiding him. The oversensitive ability of his cat ears warned him enough to allow him to bring the head of his hammer into the side of the half-rotted woman who reached for him, landing with bone crunching force. The half-ton Innocence snapped the corpse's spine and still it clawed at the stones as if to wrench itself free, glassy eyes looking up at him as if, somehow, they could pull his face into focus if they tried hard enough. _"Fuck_._"_ The word was out of his mouth before he could stop it. This, for some reason _bothered _ him. In the hope that the body of the woman would just dissolve into ash, he called upon the fire seal, nose wrinkled at the oncoming smell of burning flesh.

No sooner had the odor of smoldering hair filled his nostrils than Allen stepped away from his back to deliver a grievous blow to yet another of the undead townsfolk. The British boy had a determined if mildly disgusted look on his face, half-apologetic, half-prepared to vomit, the front of his hair splattered with gore. The kid was unstoppable, Lavi knew, and could handle hacking apart his own species because of the cursed left eye that showed him so much worse – but it was still disconcerting to the redhead. Everything here, everything they did, had an undertone of _wrongness_ that made him feel something in the back of his mind that might have been regret.

"Um… Lavi…" The white haired boy said in a voice that might have been fearful. "Is it me or… are there a lot more of them than there were a moment ago?"

At the words Lavi scanned the street up and down, attempting to count the suddenly massive number of walking dead coming for them. Why would there suddenly be so many? Hadn't Allen been told that they came from the graveyard and then spread out onto a street corner? Had that been a lie? Why would a human lie about something like that? And how the Hell were they going to get out of this alive?

He had only counted thirty-six graves that lacked corpses, so why were there more than a hundred here? And where did they stay in the daytime?

He didn't have time to wonder.

"If things get really bad, Allen-chan," He whispered, his voice unsteady otherwise. "I'll burn the whole street in about a half mile radius, but if I do that, you might have to carry me back." It was all he had time to say. The swarm of bleeding, disintegrating bodies was coming for them.

-- -- --

"Che. Piece of shit." Kanda said the words almost thankfully and pulled the plane of glass out of its crank window, thankful for the half-sleeves that covered the heels of his hands. It had taken a full fifteen minutes for him to figure how the mechanism worked and then another ten to remove the hinges from the frame and reach inside to unwind the handle from the outside, thus dislodging the whole plane of glass and outer frame from the wall. Overall it was relatively simple, but the simplicity didn't take much away from the accomplishment he felt pushing himself into the space he had provided for entrance. The only thing that could dampen that was the rush of hunger that filled his gut and the smell of fresh cut carcasses.

Crouched on the sill he could see just fine in the dim moonlight, his own silhouette laid across the bloodied floor at his feet. There was no movement aside from his own in the closed down shop, no eerie swinging of the butcher's hooks like he would have expected, no howls or scuttling creatures of evil. A quarter of beef hung not too far off, a rack of pork ribs beside it, but it was surprisingly empty besides that. He pushed himself forward experimentally until the toes of his right boot hit the floor. Nothing came in the room but a few flakes of snow from behind him. With a hard swallow, the samurai parted his lips and breathed in through his mouth and his nose at once, tasting the air. His stomach clenched at the smell of meat and blood, hungry despite the mild disgust he directed at himself for feeling it, silent even as it rolled on itself in an attempt to growl. It didn't matter how gross it was, he _needed_ to find lard and blood and find out which one it was that made him feel satisfied just so he could function, get on with the mission, and ease Lavi's fears a little. After that it was moving on with his life that mattered, really.

Following the semi-sweet flavor on the air, he moved into the darkness, dodging meat hooks and shelves and counters that he would have likely tripped on without his improved sight. He took full advantage of the ability as he made his way to the very back of the shop where, to his slight surprise, a pig lay diagonally, blooded from the throat, the fluids of which collected in a small trough at the bottom of the slab it rested on. _That_ smelled right. It looked grotesque; even a little sickening to him, but that didn't stop his fingers from brushing over the sticky red substance – still warm somehow – and bringing it to his lips.

Kanda didn't eat a lot of meat aside from fish. He had never had a liking for it. But now, with the tips of two fingers in his mouth, he didn't think manna from heaven would be so good against his tongue.

He lurched on his feet suddenly, his body willing him just to sink his teeth into the corpse and attempt to suck whatever blood that remained out of its flesh, but that was not what he wanted. He caught himself on the edge of the wooden counter, cursing softly. He was _not_ that hungry. He was _not _that far gone already.

_Fuck, you'd think I'm turning into Moyashi._ He thought as he reached out for something – anything – to store the blood in. He didn't want to just _drink_ it, though he didn't know what else to do with it. It seemed unclean. Maybe boil it and then drink it, like blood tea, that way he could at least _pretend_ it wasn't what it was. So he could tell Lavi that it wasn't what it was. _If he finds out I'm drinking pig's blood to sustain myself…_ He shook his head, lifting a clear glass jar from one of the cabinets by his feet, complete with fitting lid and improper label. _He'll never let me kiss him._ He found the end of the trough and the lever that usually allowed the blood to be drained into a bucket or bowl and placed the jar there, then lifted the little lever.

It took only moments for the container to fill and then another few seconds for him to close the jar without spilling – or drinking – any. With that finished he dug in his pockets until he found a small handful of coinage and placed it in the place he had found the jar, because breaking and entering was enough of a crime without adding theft on top of it. Finished for the moment, he held the blood in his left hand, right palm on Mugen, and made his way back to the window he had removed from its frame silently. Now wasn't the time to try imbibing even the most succulent tasting thing in the world if he had a hope of throwing up without it being noticed.

Putting the window back was a little more trouble he had thought it would be, but he managed as soon as the jar was on the ground beside him, likely growing cold in the snow. He couldn't close the window all of the way, not without having the ability to pass through solid objects, but he got it close enough not to worry about it when he walked away, container pressed against his chest under his jacket.

-- -- --

There were so _many_ of them, Allen began to forget where one body ended and another started. He was getting tired and confused, the thought of _what_ was going on and why no one had come out to see the commotion more demanding of his thoughts than the fight at hand. It didn't make any sense, and if Lavi was right, they didn't have the time to fight through all of the… zombies if they wanted to be with Kanda when whatever was happening to him finally _happened_.

"Duck!" No sooner did the word make sense to him that a serpent of fire lifted over his head and slammed into three blistering corpses that would likely have found the back of his neck given a few more moments. The bodies, burnt to ashes or hacked into chunks, were making it just a little difficult to breathe and walk properly, the smell coupled with the piles of limbs and bones cumbersome to his attempts at movement. Lavi was having more of a problem, lacking the ability to find real purchase with his boots or his hammer between the blood and the snow and the mud. At least Allen could stab the ground with his Innocence's belt and hold himself a bit above the mess they were making.

The mess that was writhing around them and would likely kill them if it was given half a chance.

"Lavi, we should get—" He turned just as a mouth closed on his right shoulder, more painful than a human bite had any right to be. The muscles in his right arm rebelled against him and refused to swing his sword around hard enough to do anything besides provoke the violent corpse. There was a familiar burn to the bite, something that went deeper than just the press of teeth into flesh.

He fell to his knees, back and neck and arm on fire, the creature's hand pressed to his face.

"Allen!" The name was all the warning he had before an oversized hammer slammed into the thing that held him, wrenching it away with enough force to tear his coat from the corpse's teeth. The next the white haired boy knew he was hefted upward, an arm under his own, numb fingers holding his Innocence to his chest.

"Lavi… d-don't let them bite you," His voice came out quieter than he wanted it but his feet still held him up, if only barely. The redhead met his gaze then, wide-eyed, fear obvious in his features.

The apprentice Bookman reached out and touched the side of Allen's face with his palm, eyebrows furrowed together in fright. "So these are akuma?"

Allen shook his head. "They don't have souls. They can't be. Maybe…" His pulled in a deep breath and convinced his arm to lift in time to sever the legs from an approaching zombie. The stars, he knew, must have been fading on his skin. "Maybe an akuma is controlling them. Or using them for their own will somehow…"

"Innocence brings them back and the akuma fills their teeth with virus? That wouldn't work; they should be eaten by it. Shouldn't they?"

"I don't know."

With a mild growl of frustration and a swirl of his hammer, Lavi reached out and pulled the British boy close to him, determination written on his grime smattered face. With a smile that didn't fit the situation he cocked his head to the side, smearing his blind eye on his shoulder while his hammer extended to accommodate him. "Hold on, Moyashi. We're gettin' outta here."

-- -- --

Back in the room, Kanda stared at the jar of blood, chewing his lower lip. Lavi and Allen were _very_ late, late enough that they'd likely catch him if he didn't drink now. He didn't want to, but he was _so_ hungry…

With a snarl he reached out and lifted the jar in his right hand, opening it with his left. His skin was too pale in the lamp light, enough so that if Lavi saw it he figured the apprentice Bookman would ban him from sexual activity for the rest of his natural life. That wasn't what Kanda wanted. Just because he was turning into something _abnormal_ did not mean he was _sick_ or incapable of thinking like himself like _some people_ seemed to be. He could get by. Even if he couldn't eat soba or tempura, he could get by.

The smell of blood almost made him drop the container. He held on to it, leaning forward on the bed to place the bottom of the jar once again on the nightstand for fear of what he would do otherwise, gasping. It wasn't all that warm anymore, but neither was he – the heat from the metal chimney that ran up the far side of the wall was almost enough to make him sweat even without his jacket at the moment – but it still felt a bit good against his palms. With a deep swallow and a forced sureness of hand that even Lavi would have been proud of, he picked up the liquid again and slowly, thirstily, brought it to his lips. The taste was too sweet to be normal, with just the balance of saltiness to keep him from casting the whole idea aside as stupid. Texturally the blood wasn't too unpleasant, thicker than water, thinner than soup, meatier than anything he had tried to _drink_ quite like this before. It occurred to him that the plan had been to boil the blood first and he hadn't, too much in need of fulfillment at the moment to care about how gross it was to partake of the substance raw.

After three gulps he realized that this went down more easily than even black pudding had, slick and somehow what his body wanted. Another wave of hunger threatened to overtake him and he swallowed twice more before he wrenched the now half empty jar away from his face, less than satisfied with what he had in his stomach but far better off than he had been before putting it there. Breathing was easier, even if it still felt like a chore.

Just when he was thinking about draining the rest of the container and finding a way to sneak out for more the next day, hopefully before the sun confined him in the room, the sound of footsteps and talking brought his mind to a halt. Without waiting to know if it was the pair he had waited for, he took one last drink and closed the lid on the jar before placing it hurriedly in the bottom drawer of the nightstand and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. From there he threw off his shirt and sleeves and moved with surprising agility under the covers that Lavi had pulled up over him before. In another universe he would have stayed exactly how he had been and told the redhead to fuck off if he showed concern, but now, here, knowing that the apprentice Bookman _worried_ about him, he needed to pretend to be fine.

When the door swung open he was reaching for the light, intent on shutting it off to help him hide.

Allen held Lavi's left arm over his shoulders, both of them pale and shaky, Allen perhaps a bit more so than he was trying to put on. The redhead looked up at him with a strangely dreamy sort of smile and tilted his head to the left, exposing a long red line down the side of his face.

"Hey, Yuu… feelin' better?" The question was marked with a ridiculously slow blink and a falter of his feet on the floor as the two moved forward unsteadily. For a moment Kanda wondered how it was that the two had made it up the stairs. "Ya look… paler but… less tired…"

Before he could stop himself, Kanda was at the redhead's other side, concern written clearly on his features. There was an overpowering scent of smoke and burnt hair and blood on the pair, mingling together so thickly he didn't immediately have the urge to do something stupid. "What happened?" He demanded, and found himself a bit surprised when Lavi slumped toward him, Allen having relinquished the arm he had kept over his shoulders.

"On the way back… we were found by… zombies." The British boy answered, wandering toward the bathroom with a pained expression on his face and his hands pulling at the grayed fabric of his coat. He winced as he dropped it on the floor between rooms, and reached up to touch the sore muscles of his right shoulder with his left hand. "They carry the Akuma virus."

"What happened to _him_?" Kanda hadn't heard a word that Allen said, not well enough to comprehend it. He more or less guided Lavi to the bed and sat him on it before the redhead turned just the wrong way, showing the wound again in an attempt to look bashful while he explained it. The samurai lurched forward, mouth opened; the same desire that had caused him to drink more pork blood than intended nearly forced his tongue to the stain on Lavi's face. With a harsh sound of denial he forced himself away from the mattress and the apprentice Bookman, breathing in quick, shallow breaths until his hand came to rest on the nearest wall. Lavi was looking up at him in question, reaching for him, while Allen leaned out of the bathroom, shirtless and skinny looking. The room lost its sound. There were just heartbeats, steady and quickening, warm and close and _maddening._ Kanda felt his own fingers touch his throat and saw Lavi speak to him, saw the apprentice Bookman push himself almost drunkenly to his feet and teeter forward, asking for him to speak, questioning the color of his eyes. The Japanese man tried to run for a moment but his feet refused to move backward.

"Yuu-chan? Are you ok, Yuu-chan?"

"_Don't… come near me…" _He could only hope he had said the words.

"I ran into a roof and you look _way_ worse than I do."

"Lavi, don't…

"Don't what, Yuu-chan? It's ok… we talked to Eva's kids and I think tha—"

Kanda moved forward.

Allen gasped at the speed with which the samurai met Lavi, driving them both to the floor against the bed, Lavi's right hand on Kanda's chest, his head drawn backward by a hand fisted in the top of his hair. The redhead made a short sound of discomfort, his palms both pushed against Kanda's skin, eye shocked wide, but he didn't say anything – only looked up at the ceiling with his lips gently parted. Next to the wall, away from Allen, the older man's mouth connected with the flesh of the redhead's bare throat, his jaws closed around a rather large line of muscle and skin. As Allen watched the samurai swallowed repeatedly, making quiet sucking sounds as he did, hair draped down to cover exactly what he was doing from sight. Lavi's hands grew compliant, running in slow, gentle lines down Kanda's back, almost encouraging him, and a trickle of blood escaped the Japanese man's mouth and he pulled away, eyes half-hooded at the bedspread.

"Che… fuck…" Kanda pulled Lavi against him in a show of weakness that momentarily left Allen speechless. It was an unspoken apology, a silent plea for comfort. There was no way to misinterpret it.

The slightly concussed redhead shifted enough to bring Kanda's face in front of his own and hold it between his hands. With a lopsided little smile Lavi leaned forward and gently kissed the older man's lips, catching a drop of his own blooded missed by the samurai's tongue. When he withdrew Kanda was looking at his eye, the light reflected eerily from his dark irises at that angle. "Is that all you need?" Lavi whispered, running his thumbs over the smooth lines of Kanda's cheekbones. "You haven't had a real meal since yesterday, so if you're still hungry you can—"

"Lavi, I'm... I just drank your bl—"

"I _know_," Lavi cut him off. "It doesn't change anything. It's ok. Crow-chan would get a kick out of it."

The little attempt at humor wouldn't normally have even made Kanda lift an eyebrow, let alone smile appreciatively, but he smiled now. It was a crooked expression, underused, a bit strained, but otherwise completely and utterly _normal_. "You're not… bothered, then." He stated it rather than asking, looking down at the oozing wound he had left on the apprentice Bookman's neck.

"It's kinda hot, actually."

"Che."

"Ew…" Allen just breathed the word and Lavi's right ear twitched at him, most likely a hint to make himself scarce. With a quiet sigh and a scowl he grabbed a shirt and shut himself in the bathroom – he could dress his shoulder himself and then go grab seven dinners – they could use the space obviously.

Once alone, Kanda pressed himself once more toward the redhead but did not bite again, choosing instead to simply enjoy the beat of another heart against his own. He was still breathing, still had a heartbeat, still harbored a soul he hoped, so maybe things hadn't changed that much yet. Maybe he was going through things slowly, the same as Lavi seemed to be. "Tell me what happened to the two of you in more detail when he gets out." He whispered, twining his arms around Lavi's shoulders when he felt a pair hook slowly around his waist. "Right now… I just…"

"Yeah." Lavi agreed without further prompting. "Me too."

-- -- --

**Good job everyone who figured it out! Yes! Kanda is indeed turning into a Vampire. Feel free to guess about the OTHER confusing things that happened in this chapter. Heehee. Hee. Hee.**

**Which I think will be reiterated next chapter when everyone talks to everyone else.**

**Sorry that there's so much packed into this chapter… please tell me if it feels too quick. 8D**

**Thanks for reading and reviewing! 8D**


	17. Preparation and Incomprehension

**EVERYTHING IS LATE!! EVEN THE GIFTS!**

**But it can't be helped. One thing at a time, ne? So first, TWS! Yay!**

**Um… I do not own DGM, if I did, there would be more nakedness and the dark themes would take over like WHOA.**

**Warnings: Cursing! NAKED! A disappointing ending! A pop culture reference omake!**

**This was finished at 5:00 AM my time. If there are typos, please do not kill me.**

**I hope you all had happy Holidays!**

-- -- --

Part Sixteen: Preparation and Incomprehension

For a few minutes the two of them stayed exactly as they were, arms wrapped around each other, Kanda's face pressed to Lavi's shoulder. The redhead kept running his right hand down the samurai's ebony hair, slowly, letting it part around his digits as he finger-combed it. Meanwhile the Japanese man stayed as he was, seemingly indifferent to the touch, eyes turned toward the blue of the bedspread. They did not speak. Instead Kanda turned his face into the turn of Lavi's throat and shivered when the apprentice Bookman returned the gesture, warm breath playing on the underside of Kanda's jaw. The heat wasn't uncomfortable to him anymore, just so much _more_ than he was used to.

_He's warm…_ The Japanese man let his mind observe without meaning to. He had never really thought about it before.

"I wasn't bitten." He breathed, and the hand that had come back to the top of his head paused for a moment before it went on in silence. "But something did happen in that alleyway, when we were attacked by that shadow." He paused and his left hand moved to Lavi's chest, unconsciously gravitating toward the highest button of the redhead's coat. Somehow, despite everything, he wanted to touch more. Even given the topic of conversation, he wanted Lavi to be closer than he was, though what he would gain from so much contact wasn't something he easily understood or desired to contemplate. It wasn't protection that he wanted, or a desire to defend – it was simply the desire for more between them. "When it pinned me something _warm_ happened. It felt good. Like… a kiss that went down into my stomach and filled it with something, like ... I don't know. I didn't think of it then but…" Lavi nodded into his shoulder, humming.

"Allen-chan and I, when we went up to the Rothchild mansion, we met Eva's kids." Lavi's fingers paused on Kanda's back for a moment, moving the curtain of hair aside to play instead against the older man's skin. _Why_ Kanda was allowing him to touch so much he couldn't say he knew, but he aimed to enjoy it to the best of his ability while the opportunity was there. Because now, for some reason, he wanted to. There was no question. "They told us about how some kids they knew changed after the shadow got them. It all kind of clicked for me then – that shadow is what's making werewolves and stuff, it's what's been terrorizing the town with its own people by making them into them." He paused, pulled away slightly, and tugged Kanda up with him, studying the lines of his face. "I'm kinda… discombobulated from hitting my head on that roof comin' back, so tell me if this makes any sense to you at all."

"Ok…"

"The zombies Allen and I ran into carry the Akuma virus. So, let's say there's an Akuma around here that can animate and infect the dead."

"Che. Great. An unstoppable army of undead was bad enough when I thought it was on _our_ side."

"Tell me about it."

"Heh."

"Now, there's also a latent accommodator lying around we haven't found yet – _that's _the shadow." Lavi went on, frowning slightly. "And when the dead start walking, they start turning people into were-things to fight off the undead, but there are always _more_ zombies so the person has to catch more people and turn _them_ to fight them off." He tilted his head to the side, ears flicking, and pulled his mouth toward the right side of his face in thought. Kanda looked up at him from his place at the redhead's shoulder and fought the sudden urge to mock his thinking face, made all the more humorous by the gentle parting of his cat ears. "Does that sound ridiculous?"

"Not entirely."

"Yay…"

With a deep sigh the Japanese Exorcist pushed himself up a bit, his face beside Lavi's, and paused at the sight of the still bleeding wound on the side of the apprentice Bookman's head. His stomach gurgled. Though he had drunk quite a bit already, it didn't seem to be enough to sate the emptiness that had taken root after not eating for nearly a day. Just the sight of blood, the metallic scent of it, was enough to make his breath catch in his throat. His hands fisted suddenly and his jaw clenched. The room narrowed a bit. He swallowed thickly, willing himself to resist the desire for more.

_I'm not an animal. I can tell myself when I've had enough_.

Lavi's hand touched the side of his face, stroking under the turn of his eye, completely unexpected. Kanda looked at the apprentice Bookman's face and waited, not understanding the caress: it didn't need a purpose, not really, but he wanted it to have one.

"If it's that bad just bite me, Yuu-chan. I told you it's fine." Lavi smiled at the curious way the samurai cocked his head, as if the apprentice Bookman had somehow read his thoughts. With a gentle expression of encouragement Lavi inclined his face to the side, exposing the previous bite mark. "When you looked at the blood on my temple your eyes turned red. If that's not thirst, I dunno what is."

Kanda shook his head, leaning away. "You're tempting me."

"You need to eat."

"I can drink something else."

"Mine is fresh."

"And _human_."

"Humans are animals. _Drink it."_

"Lavi, I don't want to hurt you."

"You're hurting me by hurting yourself."

Silence settled over the room with those words hanging between them, Kanda's eyes round and focused on Lavi's face, the apprentice Bookman fidgeting with the obvious urge to both negate the statement and declare it the most truthful thing to have ever left his lips. For a time he floundered, mouth opening and closing repeatedly, before the Japanese man moved forward again, slowly this time, and laid his mouth on the wound he had made only moments before. The redhead hugged him tenderly, aware of the tension in Kanda's shoulders and the shiver of revulsion in his movements. The press of teeth to flesh made him quake slightly, partly in anticipation, partly in fear, before he felt the lightest tug of suction on his flesh. The lips on his shoulder were cold, though not as much as he might have expected from a vampire.

Yuu was still alive, after all.

"That's it, Yuu-chan. Just take what you need. Didn't even really hur—_ow!_"

Kanda pressed a hand to Lavi's arm and moved it enough to grab the redhead's fingers and squeeze them. At first Lavi was surprised by it, speechless, and then it occurred to him how very _honest_ the Japanese man was being, how guilty he had to feel in living off of the blood of another. Instead of proclaiming his epiphany and pushing the samurai away enough to soothe him, Lavi returned the press of fingers on the back of his hand and breathed in deeply, trying to exude a feeling of understanding and warmth with nothing but the touch.

_It's ok. Everything's ok. It's ok._ He repeated the words in his mind as Kanda drank, slowly and shallowly, as if he felt fear at what he was doing. Lavi didn't want that, but there was little he could do about it now.

The Japanese man pulled back slowly, a groan in his throat, and coughed, a line of goosebumps sprouting down his back. "Che. No more."

"Are you full?"

Kanda tried to nod, even though he knew it was partially a lie. He wasn't full, but he wasn't about to drink anymore than he already had. "I'm fine." He made the lie verbal. For a brief moment he held his breath, waiting for the redhead to tell him not to be dishonest and force him to take more, make him become violent to avoid it, annoy him until one of them fainted from a lack of bodily fluids. Kanda did not want to fight right now, not about his health or the Innocence or anything – he only wanted, for the first time in recent memory, to curl his arms around the larger man and be _weak_.

The younger man sighed deeply, turned his warm face against the cold skin of Kanda's neck. His breath was astoundingly hot and moist, playing delicately across the surface of the samurai's flesh, ebbing against the underside of his ear. With a soft sound of uncertainty, Kanda lifted his face enough to kiss the redhead, gently, unhurriedly, hardly using his tongue at all. Lavi returned the caress with more enthusiasm than the Japanese man was expecting, leading him in a series of more intimate touches, giving him permission to do what he wanted. With a fluidness that Kanda did not know Lavi possessed, the apprentice Bookman slid up the side of the bed and pulled the smaller man down with him, guiding Kanda's hands to the buttons of his coat.

"Yuu-chan…" Lavi breathed between kisses, his fingers pressed to the flesh of Kanda's chest. "What are we gonna do after… you know… if…" He stopped at the feeling of his jacket coming slowly open and simply watched, slightly surprised by the reverence with which the older man moved on to the fabric of his shirt. It gave him more courage to say what he needed to say, if only in a whisper. "If we have sex, is it just… you taking what you want or…" The fingers on his chest flattened out, pressing on his half bare flesh. "Are we gonna… like… commit?"

"Aren't you horrified of commitment?"

"A little?"

"A little horrified?"

"Yeah."

"Che."

"But!" Lavi continued talking, moving his left palm to Kanda's mouth. The man above him looked slightly irked at him for placing it there, but remained silent, black eyes blinking in curiosity. Lavi moved his hand down and sat up, bringing their faces closer. "That doesn't mean… just… I don't want you sleeping with anyone else. And… laying down makes my head throb, wanna help me bandage it?" The two sentences, so very different and undeserving of the same conversation, came out with the same tone and emotion, casual, and yet somehow more timid than Lavi had ever been. For a moment Kanda simply stared at him, studying the tired lines of his face in the light, seeming not to understand what the younger man had said. After a few seconds the samurai pulled back enough to sit up on his knees, straddling the red haired Exorcist. His hands stayed on Lavi's body, fiddling with the material of his clothes.

"You… think I would?" There was no tone of accusation or defense in Kanda's words, but Lavi's eyes widened at them nonetheless. "I don't think I'd ever want to." It was as if the idea had never occurred to him, as if he had only ever thought of sleeping with one person – Lavi – and never looking at others again. The way his eyebrows furrowed and his head turned to the side only added to the innocent quality he somehow managed to embody.

"You mean that." Lavi observed softly, and his left hand moved to Kanda's right hip as if to tug him closer.

Kanda's voice fell to a very soft whisper, eyes cast down at the redhead's stomach. "I can't say I can stand any other human long enough to take off their clothes." Though he said it in all seriousness Lavi chuckled at him, fingers rubbing softly at his hip, and smiled. It wasn't the kind of expression he had expected from the apprentice Bookman, but it was better than most.

"I'm gonna start bleedin' on the bed unless we get something on the side of my head."

"Right."

-- -- --

By the time Allen was out of the bathroom, sporting a rather crooked bandage on his right shoulder that made the one on his nose and the cut on his upper lip look even worse, Lavi had a small white patch of gauze taped to the side of his temple, Kanda had pulled a thin shirt on – comfortable in the cool room without long sleeves – and they both seemed more normal than they had been before Allen had dashed away alone. The two of them, Lavi and Kanda, sat on opposing beds, Lavi's eyelid drooping low as if he were tired, and his shoulders pressed against the propped up pillows lazily. As the British boy watched the redhead rolled onto his side and looked up at Kanda with a very lethargic catlike expression, as if he could not help falling asleep.

"I should shower…" Lavi mumbled, and then sighed, blinking slowly. "But I really don't feel like doing anything at the moment but sleepin'. Or eating. Or…" His eye wandered first down Kanda's body and then to his feet, hanging off of the edge of the bed. From there he caught sight of Allen's shadow and looked up at the younger Exorcist, grinning. "How's your shoulder?" He inquired, as if hadn't just undressed a man with his eye.

"Sore, but it should be ok by tomorrow."

"Figured."

Kanda looked sidelong at Allen, glanced away, looked again, unable to make up his mind it seemed. "So the plan is fucked." He finally said, but he said it looking at Lavi. "You're both wounded, and I would rather not be caught in the sun when it comes up. I might burst into flame instead of getting a headache."

Lavi blinked at that, worried, and frowned, exhausted face drawn into an expression Kanda had never seen him make. His eye, normally smiling, had faded somehow, his lips pressed into a line of discontent. The redhead pushed himself up and tried to stand only to have Kanda come to him instead, pushing him gently to the side to share the mattress by his hips.

"I can fight if I need to but… I don't want to face that many zombies if I can help it." Allen admitted, and picked up his dirty jacket before hanging it on the bathroom door knob. From the sleeve the large gold orb of Tim's body fluttered, coming up to circle the British boy's head before settling into his hair, wings held out to either side as if frightened he might fall. The British boy reached up and barely touched the delicately balanced golem, a little smile on his lips. "I'm hungry." He added, as if the other two couldn't have guessed that themselves.

Lavi shrugged a little, and then yawned. "I could eat but… meh…"

"I'll bring you something back, if you'd like." Allen offered, cocking an eyebrow at the idea. His lips lifted in a devilish smile, his eyes narrowed. It didn't take a Bookman to know that the boy was about to say something bratty that would likely lead to something violent and bloody and unpleasant. Before he spoke he chuckled, unable to contain his amusement. "Maybe a sandwich and a bottle of vegetable oil?" He ducked the roll of gauze that Kanda threw at him, snickering. "You would prefer water based then?" The medical scissors came next, stabbing into the door frame beside him with murderous force. Allen didn't particularly care, not as long as no one was really hurt. Besides, Kanda was hilarious. "Perhaps I can bring you both? And a bevvy to put you in the mood?" The Bible – found in the top drawer of the nightstand – was deflected by Allen's left hand, which caused Lavi to burst into loud, obnoxious giggles while Kanda sneered. The Japanese man didn't open the bottom of the nightstand to throw _that_ drawer's contents at the British boy, but it was obvious he was thinking about it.

Lavi placed a hand on Kanda's nearest hip as if the touch would soothe rather than frustrate the samurai. "Whatever you're in the mood for buying, Allen-chan," Lavi grinned, and tilted his head to the side a bit, showing his teeth. "I kinda want something meaty though. So… no salad. Or pasta." With his order given he looked up and sideways at Kanda, then remembered that the samurai couldn't really eat and frowned, a bit disappointed. His fingers curled a little and the Japanese man looked down at him with a raised eyebrow, seeming for a short span of time not to understand what it was that bothered the redhead.

Kanda sighed softly and shook his head. "I don't even like eating. It's fine."

Lavi pouted.

"So what will we do?" Allen asked one last time, kneeling in front of his coat so he could dust at it, picking off strands of hair that weren't his as well as globs of soot and snow paste, slowly melting in the room's heat. He would have to wash his hands again when he was finished, knowing what that ash was made of. "Eat first and then decide if we're going to risk being caught in the graveyard at sunrise? Or head out tomorrow? We have time to wait, but if we're _wrong_ about where we think the Innocence is, we may not have time to search somewhere else before the two of you lose your minds like everyone else. But then again," Allen went on, taking a breath before he spoke his thoughts as they came. "We don't really know if you will lose your minds. If everyone else turned at once the way Hilary said, then maybe this is as much like a vampire and as much like a werecat as the two of you will ever be." Satisfied with the cleanliness of his coat, he lifted it from the knob and pulled first his right arm and then his left through the sleeves, bouncing Tim a bit with the motion. The golem came down to rest on his shoulder, gently, and he gave it an affectionate rub before he turned to the others and blinked expectantly, waiting.

Kanda cleared his throat. "While you two were gone Mörder came in. He said that the people like Lavi can't leave the graveyard if they stay too long." He shook his head, frowning deeply, and laid his hand across the back of Lavi's as if it were an entirely casual motion. Allen's eyes followed the motion, but he didn't say anything about it, not when Kanda was working so hard to play down the act. "I'd rather not be _stuck_ there when the sun comes up and there's no shade and we aren't finished with what we have to do there because we only had a few hours of night to work with. I say we wait, even though I _fucking hate_ waiting." He breathed in deeply and sighed, black eyes narrowed at the floor in front of his feet. "We just have to _leave_ tomorrow at sundown, to give us the biggest window possible."

"I like that idea." Lavi agreed with a nod. "So far, only you've been able to destroy those not-zombies, so we can't leave you here and go in the daytime… for all we know, they'll show up in the day if we go back now. Hilary didn't say what time it was when his friends were turned." He looked to Allen then, eye brightening a bit with an idea. "How about we eat dinner, rest tonight, and tomorrow you and I take another look around town and see if we can find anything out and… maybe – why did Mörder come in here?" He turned the question on Kanda, eyebrows pushed together in the center of his forehead. "You didn't invite him or…"

"Che. No. He came in wanting to shoot you. You were saying…"

"Oh. So Allen and I go out and search for any _other_ leads, and then we see the end of this one tomorrow night. I guess… you get to sleep all day tomorrow." He grinned up at Kanda. "Maybe I should tire you out?"

Allen made a little coughing sound and took a step toward the door. He had not taken off his boots, so he had no real reason to stop and pause at the door, but he did all the same, looking back with furrowed eyebrows. Kanda glanced up at the British boy before deciding that Tim really didn't matter – Komui would figure it out if they hid it or not – and so turned to Lavi with an emphasized leer. "Want to go in the bathroom where I can lean you over the counter?" He had only just said the words when the door opened and shut again, marking Allen's exit from the room. Kanda smiled down at the slightly stunned redhead and tilted down at him, intent on giving him a small, gentle kiss on the forehead.

"I dunno, Yuu-chan… I keep thinking stupid things."

"Che. Did you know the sky is blue?"

"Sometimes you remind me of Allen."

"Fuck you."

"And then you say something like _that_ and I realize how entirely _wrong_ that observation is."

Kanda placed a hand on either side of Lavi's head and leaned against his pillow, looking down at him very much like the younger man had looked down at him earlier in the day. "What are you thinking about that's stupid?" Fingers crawled against the fabric at the bottom of his shirt, bravely pretending to belong there.

"Things like…" Lavi looked away before he looked up again, chewing his lower lip. His ears went back against his hair before they perked up again at an idea, tilted forward at the samurai. "Explain why you love me." He blurted at last, and Kanda blinked at him for a long moment, eyebrows pushed together in the middle of his forehead.

_Stupid. Fucking. Words._

"It…" Kanda began lamely. "When…" He tried again. After a moment he closed his eyes and focused, forcing himself to convey the information, no matter how wrong it came out. What kind of question was that, anyway? An _unfair_ one, he was sure. "After you were bitten, I carried you to the bar thinking about how you were going to die. I mean… before that I always thought that things would be…_off_ without you, but…" He shook his head, shading his unnaturally dark eyes with his bangs. "You asked me to kiss you and you meant enough for me to fill it – thinking it was your last request. _That_ kind of… I started to… wa…wan—I started to…" He grimaced and his hands fisted against the pillow, his shoulders tensed with the effort. For some reason the words _'want you'_ refused to follow the phrase _'I started to'_ properly, and he came out stumbling. He bit his tongue for a moment before he opened his eyes and narrowed them, determination filling his gut. "Think about you more, and as time went on one thing led to another. I can't pin point everything I love about you because I love _you_. I _don't_ love how fucking irritating you are sometimes, but that's trivial in comparison to everything else." He finished. His expression, made slightly darker in the lamp light, was one of a man who felt he had completed an impossible task with an undertone of something like fear. It made Lavi smile a little at him.

"Ok." The apprentice Bookman said back quietly. "I don't remember asking you to kiss me, but the rest helps." He reached up with his arms and draped them around Kanda's neck, pulling him down a bit, the unsure tone of his voice not matching his actions at all, the Japanese man frowned at him, but Lavi did not care if Kanda saw through his façade of emotional stability. If anyone deserved to know about his emotional _hole_ it was Kanda, being he had caused it. "We've got time while Allen eats… so… I wasn't lying about that wearing you out thing. Or we can… I don't know… cuddle? See where it leads us?" He lifted an eyebrow.

Kanda frowned deeper. "Did you just… suggest sex and cuddling as if one is just as good as the other?"

"Yeah. So? You used the word _trivial_ and you don't see me freakin' out like you did something outstanding."

"You're not being outstanding, you're being strange."

"Whatever." Lavi rolled his eyes at the same time he rolled his hips, tugging Kanda's eyes in that direction. "I'm only getting sleepier as the night gets older…"

"Scoot over." Kanda pushed himself to the far side of the bed, clamoring over the redhead, and settled on his side, facing him. For a moment the apprentice Bookman struggled to kick off his boots and remove his jacket before he faced the samurai, face drawn into an expression of wonder. Kanda couldn't help but frown at the other's stupidity and curiosity, the way he blinked as if the position made everything new and entertaining. The Japanese man narrowed his eyes at it. "Now turn the other way."

"What for?"

"It's called spooning, nitwit."

"Yuu-chan spoons?"

"You want to do this or not?"

Lavi chewed the inside of his cheek for a minute, mumbled. "It's more comfortable with the larger person behind so… you should roll over." His eye was almost pleading.

"Che. You aren't that much taller than me."

"But I _am_ taller."

"And you have boat-feet. Roll over."

"Yuu-chan, if my feet are boats, yours are _oceans_."

"That doesn't even make sense."

"Neither does being shorter than me and having bigger feet." Lavi nodded to himself in agreement as he laid his fingers on the underside of Kanda's shirt. The older man didn't complain at it so he moved forward, rolling the Japanese man to the side despite his previous protests. Before long Lavi had Kanda how he wanted him, facing away, and curled an arm around the samurai's chest. For a long moment they simply lay there without moving, Kanda tense against the redhead's insistence, ridged almost like he had been the first night they had slept beside each other. Lavi worked his face into the older man's back and turned his lips against the round of his shoulder, letting his mouth move against it as he spoke, vibrating sound down Kanda's back. "Don't be like that, Yuu-chan. It doesn't matter who does what as long as it's comfortable for both of us. I'm not treating you like a woman," Lavi bent his knees until they came up behind the older man's to match his shape. "I'm just trying to fit together better."

Kanda didn't respond. He simply lay there, all too aware of the hand stroking down the front of his shirt, and blinked for a moment. When the silence grew thick he cleared his throat and rolled back a bit, leaning his weight on Lavi. "You smell like ash." He observed, and the hand on his chest paused in its path down his front.

"Like I said, I need to shower. That fight pretty much covered me in other people's disintegrated parts." The redhead grumbled back before he settled his face against Kanda's shoulder at a better angle. The position was only growing in intimacy the more comfortable the apprentice Bookman became, his mind tickled at the edges with the desire for something even more so. He shut the desire away and hummed in the back of his throat at the feeling of fingers on the skin of his wrist.

"You should be more careful."

"I was running to come find you, so a zombie attack was about the last thing on my mind."

"Me?"

"Didn't want ya to start changing alone like I did. Figured you think it was death coming for you and then try to commit seppuku."

"You can't commit seppuku alone; someone has to chop off your head. And there has to be a real reason for it – all life leads to suffering, a little more than normal isn't a reason to kill yourself."

"That's… really depressing." Lavi complained, and pulled Kanda a little closer, hooked his arm lower on the lower man's hips. He sighed, spreading hot air into Kanda's left ear and down the side of his neck. "I don't feel like talking about you dying, even if it's not happening any time soon. I start feeling shaky and my heart goes faster. Can't really sleep like that, you know?" The redhead lifted himself enough to lean over Kanda's shoulder and look down at him, a false smile playing on his lips.

The Japanese Exorcist reached back with his left hand to pull the younger man into a sideways, awkward embrace, one armed, and buried his face in the apprentice Bookman's throat. "Fine." Agreeing didn't seem as strange as it once had. "Is there anything you _do_ want to talk about, then?"

"I'd like to talk about what we're going to do… after."

"After…"

Lavi shifted enough to press Kanda's back against the mattress and lay partially across his chest. That position, though a little awkward, allowed him to lay his head on the older man's shoulder and speak to his face. "When the mission is over and we're both normal again, after we're… human. I don't… want you to go on a mission without me and…" His expression suddenly became very different, fading from a thoughtful sort of frown to wide-eyed and terror-stricken. He paled. His hands fisted on Kanda's shirt for a moment and his mouth fell open, a little sound of discontent in his throat. Lavi rocked upward and threw himself away, scrambling for the edge of the bed as quickly as his cat-like reflexes could make him, moving over the bedspread with panic burning in his eye. He made it a step away from the bed before Kanda hooked him around the waist and threw him back again, concern written on his beautiful features even as Lavi hit the mattress with enough force to make the frame shriek in disuse.

"What's wrong with you?" The demand was soft despite the older man's violence.

"Lemme go a sec, it'll only be a minute." Lavi insisted at once, but Kanda didn't move from where he was, attempting to pin the larger man against the bed. The redhead reached up and pushed at his chest, giving himself enough room to slide two inches before Kanda latched onto him again. "Let go, I'm not gonna do anything stupid." But the hand that had fisted on his shirt only renewed its grip at the words.

Kanda shook his head. "Tell me where you're going and why."

"To the bathroom, because I might…"

"Might?"

Lavi's hands stopped pushing for a moment and instead spread out to the Japanese man's shoulders. He should have used his limited knowledge on pressure points to shove the older man off, if not used his only slightly larger frame to his advantage and physically thrown him aside, but neither option seemed that mentally appealing. Instead he bent in the middle and leaned up into Kanda, swallowing the lump in his throat. "I might cry… or something. I don't… want this to be a one night stand or something, but every time I bring it up, you dodge my question. I just… don't want you to…" He looked up at the sudden lack of weight across his body and stiffened at the touch of cold palms on either side of his face, tilting his head upward. Speechlessly he accepted the kiss Kanda offered, slow and short, before he tried to go on again. "I think about you so much when I'm not with you, but I can only think about how _sad_ I'll be when I'm _not_ with you when I'm with you. And it makes me _worry_ which makes me even _sadder_. What am I doing wrong?" With his mouth momentarily stilled, Kanda kissed him again, more deeply, and began to tug at the fabric of his shirt, guiding it slowly from his skin.

Kanda didn't say a word about what he thought about the situation, he only removed the garment and threw it aside before he sank to explore the younger man's chest with his mouth. This wasn't a solution, Lavi could see that, but he was swiftly forgetting what it was that bothered him so much to make him think he might cry. It was rather impossible to form thoughts with the older man's tongue swirling against his skin; even more so when a cool hand began to pull at his belt before he could yank away the Japanese man's shirt. It happened faster than he would have liked, with little appreciation for the flesh that slowly came into the light. It was only moments before the redhead lay in only his pants and socks, eye half-hooded, lifting his covered hips into Kanda's, pulling down with fingers tangled in samurai's hair. The lips that had danced across the skin of his chest came up to his mouth and captured it, coaxing his tongue forward at the same moment that Kanda rocked a leg between his, eliciting a startled moan from his throat.

A curse sounded against the side of his jaw, foreign, and he returned the press of thigh on his manhood, forcing a shiver down the length of Kanda's spine.

"_Fuck_, we need lube." The redhead breathed upward, and the cool skin of Kanda's forehead found the length of his throat.

"Feeling better?"

"Yeah, but it's only temporary." Lavi mumbled back, and Kanda took the words as an invitation to lick the skin on the underside of his jaw. With a loud purr, Lavi laid back his head and closed his eyes, digging his fingers into the smooth flesh of Kanda's back. "I thought you said no touching until I knew how I felt?"

"But I want you," Kanda growled against his throat. "And this is me touching you, I explained _that_ before." He pushed himself higher and thrust his hips forward, drawing a long, keening cry from Lavi's lips. "Besides, if you had to know how you felt to have sex, you'd be a virgin."

Lavi blushed deeply. "I am a virgin."

"Che." Kanda rolled his eyes emphatically. "With how you go after women?"

"You think that shit works, Yuu-chan? Yeah right! Just because I try harder than you doesn't mean I get more." Lavi would have gone for a moment but for the sudden press of teeth on his throat, more painful than he would have liked, complimented by a tongue sweeping over his skin. He was only mildly surprised when he felt his skin break under the pressure, oozing blood into his friend's waiting lips. The sensation wasn't that unpleasant, rather the initial pain was muted by a feeling of Kanda relaxing against him, every barrier the older man had put up and held in place with his tensed muscles falling away as he sucked almost against his will. Lavi made himself match the man's demeanor, tilting his head against the pillow and lifting his hips a bit, a motion that only proved he wasn't discouraged by the older man's actions.

Kanda made a sound at him, softly, and pulled his mouth away, growling low in his throat. "I wanted to kiss it."

"But your teeth got in the way?"

The Japanese man shook his head, the dark curtain of his hair falling across Lavi's shoulders with the motion. His eyes, dyed a dark crimson from hunger, caught Lavi's gaze and held it, hooded in the firelight, his lips softly parted, blood wetting his bottom lip as well as the right corner of his mouth. The redhead reached down and tried to wipe the little dribble away and paused, caught by the sight of teeth that he shouldn't have been able to see, fangs on the top and bottom of Kanda's mouth, blood smeared and deadly. They hadn't been there before, Lavi didn't think, but the older man didn't seem to have notice when they had grown.

"I'm sorry." The words were so soft, Lavi almost didn't hear them.

"It's ok." The redhead whispered, finishing the sweep of his thumb. With the liquid on his skin he pressed the digit between Kanda's lips and ran it across the samurai's tongue, smearing his own blood against it. Kanda closed his lips, eyes wide, even as he instinctually pulled the liquid from the apprentice Bookman's thumb. "You haven't even had a pint yet. I won't even feel it. 'Sides, I'm hot and bothered, you think I care about love bites?" Kanda's jaws shut on his finger, which in turn broke the smooth skin of the finger's pad and began to fill the older man's mouth with a steady stream of blood, which in turn made his eyes flare for a moment, pupils standing out against the harsh red of his irises. _"God_…" Lavi mumbled, and pushed his finger against the Japanese man's tongue. "Why do you have to be so _hot?"_

With a hurried swallow Kanda closed his blood colored eyes and threw his hips forward, reminding Lavi of what exactly they had been doing before his hunger had gotten the best of him. The redhead let out a startled moan, back arched almost painfully from the mattress.

"Don't—_Yuu-chan!_ Don't do that we don't have any—" Lavi cut himself off with a gasp, shaking, as he rocked against the older man's motion, irritated at the brush of his clothes against his groin. "Please, please, Yuu… it makes you a tease if we can't—"

Lavi's digit popped wetly from Kanda's mouth, no longer bleeding, and his hand went at once to grab at the back of the samurai's hair, tangling in the mess of his tresses. "I'll go downstairs and get something."

"With fangs and red eyes and looking paler than death? Sure. Great way to get us all burned at the stake or shot."

"I have fangs?"

Lavi nodded. "I'll go."

"I'll use my mouth on you."

"Yuu-chan. Fangs, sensitive organ I don't want to lose – not compatible."

"Then…" He slammed his hips forward and moved both of his hands to Lavi's pillow, holding them at an intimate and awkward position, his own neck tilted back with the force of Lavi's hold on his hair. "Stay here. I have an idea." Without another word Kanda moved away, leaving Lavi panting up at the ceiling with his eye half-focused, frowning in the dim light. Kanda reached out with a pale arm and turned out the light, then went even farther away, groping under the bed. He withdrew his suitcase and popped it open as quickly as his fingers long would allow him, spilling clothes and a brush and a wet stone across the floor before he pulled out a black bag, a triumphant look coming across his face.

Lavi watched the man open the bag and pull out a small stack of what might have been rice paper followed by a strange wooden looking hammer, which Kanda scowled at before he put it back in and came out with a medium sized glass bottle. The liquid inside was clear, and only three-fourths of the way up the bottle. Black writing marred the side of the container, none of which Lavi actually understood the meaning of.

"_Tasukata."_

"Bless you. What's in the bottle?"

Kanda looked back at Lavi and narrowed his eyes, pretending to glare, pretending to care that Lavi had insulted his mother tongue. With a flick of his eyes he shook the bottle in front of the redhead's face as if to flaunt what it contained. "It's _choji_ oil."

"Ew. No threesomes. And _definitely_ not with Chouji."

"Che." Kanda frowned purposely. "It's mineral oil, smartass."

"And you have it because…"

"For Mugen."

"Ok, Mugen isn't someone I want involved either."

"Lavi."

"I get it. Sometimes, when you get lonely, and you're looking at your Innocence—"

"Shut the _fuck_ up before I decide that I don't give a damn how much I want you, it's not worth getting worked up over. It keeps the blade from sticking in the scabbard and makes it look better."

Lavi let out a soft laugh and smiled, running his fingers down the length of Kanda's hair. The motion allowed him to catch the snags he had caused and comb them out, fingertips playing across the Japanese man's back. "Sorry. You're less… violent than you used to be. If I'd said that before, you'd have cut off my arms, not looked at me like rape was in my future," Lavi touched Kanda's chest again for a moment before running his palms to the man's pants and tugging on them, intent on getting them open. "You know how to use that? I've got educated guesses, if you need my input, but I've never… and… _you've_ never, right? I mean… I think you're a virgin but—"

"I'm guessing." Kanda said hurriedly. "I… want this enough not to give a damn how bad it's going to be if we screw up. Make sense to you?"

Lavi nodded as if he were lying and pulled Kanda's pants low on his hips, revealing a small amount of delicious looking skin, pale in the semidarkness, almost inhumanly so. With his slightly unsure fingers, the redhead pushed the material lower, revealing the short line of hair that lead his eye to the half hard organ that he sought. With a hard swallow he circled his hands around Kanda waist and dragged him downward, pressing that heated skin against his own clothed erection, chewing his lower lip in bittersweet agony at the friction the action caused.

The bottle of oil sank until it hit the covers; Kanda's face fell into the apprentice Bookman's shoulder.

"Yuu-chan…" Lavi breathed into the samurai's ear, waving the man's hair against the delicate flesh there. "Being we've never done this before and we don't know what we like, you can go about this the way you want, ok? If you want me to lay here while you lead then… that's fine. I'd like to touch you as much as you do me, but if you're not comfortable with that yet, then I understand." His left hand snaked its way down the length of Kanda's hair and he pulled the tips of it to his lips, laying a soft kiss on the sheet of liquid ebony captured between his fingers. The strands ran out of his hand with the force of gravity, which allowed him to return his touch to his previous hold on Kanda's hips. "No matter how pretty you are, I never want you to think I'm treatin' you like a woman." He added, and a sly sort of smile spread across his face, eye sparkling in the semidarkness.

"You… really mean that?" Kanda's voice was just as soft against Lavi's cheek. The words missed his ear, too low to be whispered teasingly into it like they might have human features.

"Yeah. You're _super_ pretty when the light shines off your hair almost like blue silver and you make that little crooked face like your smile's broken."

"Che. I meant the _other_ part, fucktard. I'm _not_ pretty."

"Right. Sure. Unlike _some people_ I know, I'm adventurous. Won't knock it 'til I try it." Lavi grinned as Kanda pulled away, perfectly amused by the scowl creasing his friend's lips. The apprentice Bookman wasn't lying, or at least didn't look like he was, and the way the he swept the Japanese man's hair over his shoulder only made Kanda more confident in his observation. Watching the older man frown and lean down above him, dark eyes half hooded, made that strange hole in Lavi's emotional divide feel something he had never felt so keenly before. That space hadn't bothered him for a time, his senses too distracted by the things going on around him, but he felt it now – and the roiling, dark, almost painful emotion that Kanda's frown caused in the hollow of his chest.

Kanda kissed him without changing expressions. It was an action that made the apprentice Bookman tilt his head upward, begging for more without words to say for it. He wanted to ask for it. He wanted to say something meaningful without using his voice. But Kanda withdrew, and Lavi was left sharing his air, fingers pressed on skin with bruising force.

"Do you love me, _Baka Koneko?"_

Lavi swallowed in a dry throat. "Does it matter?"

Kanda's eyes closed at him, but the man's face stayed where it was, only inches from his own. "Why else would you give yourself to me if not because of love?"

"Because _you_ love _me_," Lavi answered before he could even think about the question, "I don't understand love, or how I'm supposed to feel when I experience it, or how it makes someone think – I just know that you want this and I can give it to you, and it's not like I'm saving myself for someone better or anything. Not to say that I'd just have sex with anyone… I mean… there _are_ people I would say no to. You're…" He felt his eyebrows go together and pulled his lips down in thought. "Important. And… if you love me then… it means something to you. It's ok if it means something to you. My… head hurts thinking about this." He blinked rapidly, shaking his head, and stopped only when he heard the glass of Kanda's bottle connect with the wood of the nightstand, fingers pressed to the side of his face.

Lavi couldn't help but feel very small when Kanda looked down at him and held his gaze, searching for something, reading his emotions without pause. There was nothing the redhead could do but wait, unsure of what was about to happen, lost in his own sea of thoughts.

"What do you mean, _important?"_

"I can't think about this right now, I get too emotional and things start to hurt."

"Just explain it to me," Kanda insisted, "Tell me what you mean by _important."_

Lavi narrowed his eye, aware of the headache starting on the left side of his face, just at the corner of his temple. The feeling was oddly familiar, though why that was he couldn't quite remember. "I… don't know…" He tried to shake his head again but the hand kept him in place. "You mean something. You… smile and I like it. You take up a lot of my thoughts even when I try to think about other things, and thinking about other things makes me feel guilty and I start to think about you. I feel like… if you want to make love to me because you love me, I should let you because I want to make you happy." He screwed his eye shut and moved his left hand up to press on it, blocking out even the darkest part of the room. The headache had spread across his eye and his nose, threatening to consume both sides of his face in pain. His eye felt tired, as if he had strained it somehow, and he kept it closed when he moved his hand away to touch Kanda's chest almost shyly. Without seeing, without being able to read the older man's expressions, he could only trust the sound of a slightly surprised breath just above him.

Kanda's fingers trailed up into Lavi's hair and he cleared his throat. "Are you feeling ok?"

The redhead managed to wince and open his eye at once. "Headache. Really bad headache."

"It's not an ear thing, is it?"

"No. I don't think so."

With an exasperated sigh Kanda moved away almost disappointedly, sliding to the mattress beside Lavi. He didn't bother to do up his pants. He didn't bother putting up his hair. Instead he simply pulled the redhead close and _cuddled_ of his own accord, curling against the larger man's chest silently for a moment while he gathered his thoughts. "You're such an idiot. Try to sleep it off before Moyashi gets back."

"Am I a mood killer?"

"No, but I'm not having sex with you while you're in pain."

"Oh."

"No matter _how_ stupid you are."

-- **Omake Awkward!Special --**

With an exasperated sigh Kanda moved away almost disappointedly, sliding to the mattress beside Lavi. He didn't bother to do up his pants. He didn't bother putting up his hair. Instead he simply pulled the redhead close and cuddled of his own accord, curling against the larger man's chest silently for a moment while he gathered his thoughts. "You're such an idiot. Try to sleep it off before Moyashi gets back."

"Am I a mood killer?"

"No. I jizzed in my pants."

"Oh. What!? Yuu-chan! Ew! Go change!"

"Your fault."

"Get off!"

"Already did."

"YUU!"

-- -- --

**Yes, the omake WAS going to be a Christmas omake, and then… there was that amazing song on YouTube. Seriously, go look it up. **_**I Jizzed in my Pants**_**, so great. Very American humor there, I think.**

**Anyways! Sorry if I missed your review! I'll try to get it tomorrow! Also, thank you people who point out typos! You make reading a better experience for people later! :3**

**Thanks for reading and reviewing! I'll try not to be this late again. DX**


	18. Sentiment and Purity

**Yo! So… my fics are slowly getting back into rhythm now that I've been writing other things you guys don't see (yet), and I've become used to the idea that…**

**MY SISTER IS PREGNANT!**

**I know… **_**'WTF Niamh! What does that have to do with YOU?'**_** Is what you're thinking, furrowing your eyebrows and wanting me to get the fuck ON with it because you're TIRED of Allen ruining the sex and you CANNOT wade through that long of an author's note on TOP of being denied smut. So here's my simple answer: I live with her. That means, sometime in September, if I'm still here, I'll be helping to take care of either lil Katja or lil Imhotep Link (I need to talk them out of that name…), which will slow me WAY down, I think. As a warning. 83**

**Other than that…  
Yes, I'm working on TFL. YES, I will update about the same time I update TWS again. No, I didn't quit. YES, this is a peace offering. ilu?**

**Disclaimer: I continue to not own D. Gray – Man. If I did… the manga would FREAKIN' UPDATE. (No offense to Hoshino-sensei meant. I love you. Really.)**

**WARNINGS: Cussing! Bad sexual jokes! An omake! Naked! Horror! Blood! A Kanda that's smarter than Lavi! And kind of clingy!**

**---**

Part Seventeen: Sentiment and Purity

The street was so dark he could almost mistake the sky for velvet, the pinpricks of the stars as holes behind which burned an ever distant white-hot flame. The moon, too large for the sky at this point in the month, shone down at him with an eerie sort of face carved into the side of it, laughing at him, laughing at the sticky stone cobblestones on which he walked. With a slight furrowing of his eyebrows he knelt and looked at the street more closely, lip curling at the red substance that stained the gray stone like wet paint, thick in places and thinner in others.

Blood.

The liquid ran up the street in a trail of wet drops and smears, some smaller, some larger, until they disappeared behind a large brick building, no footprints to accompany them. Slowly, boots sticking as he walked, he made his way around the building and stopped, his hands going to his mouth at the overpowering scent of rotted flesh that filled his lungs, clinging to his nostrils. Reeling backward he moved away from the lump of disintegrating corpses, dead hands reaching for him, dead eyes following him as he moved, dead mouths gapping at him in want of something he had. The faces were all haggard and broken, ripped and bleeding black blood, burned in places and sliced in others, permeating the air with their putrid scent so thickly that he wanted to gag at it, wanted to throw up whatever it was that he had eaten for dinner. He took a hurried step away from the horrible sight as a cloud moved from in front of the moon, bathing the scene in a wash of crisp white light. A pair of blue eyes, darker than the midnight sky and yet still blue, caught and held his gaze. They were upside down, and missing their customary black frame of hair.

He rocked back farther; a word of protest broke in his throat. The cobblestones washed with blood to the toes of his boots, soaking into the fabric of his socks despite the leather. He stepped away. Again. The eyes held his gaze and he trembled, fear and denial building in his gut.

A cold hand gripped his right shoulder and pulled him backward _rolling_ him away from the scene before his eyes. His feet almost tangled together, but he refused to fall. The face that greeted him was exactly as he remembered it, fogged eyes unable to draw him into focus, the mouth below them hanging like a warped door from a rusted hinge, crooked, bleeding down the front of the woman's neck. He felt another word of protest die in his throat, cracking over a numb and unresponsive tongue.

"_What's wrong, Lavi?"_ The woman's voice was far too perfect for her features, _"We're only ink on paper."_

"_No."_

"Lavi!"

"_No!"_

"Baka-Lavi!"

"No!" With a sharp intake of breath Lavi jerked awake, shoving himself away from the hands that touched his shoulder and his chest, tearing at whatever skin he could reach. The hands moved to take him by the wrists and he brought his knee up only to have it suddenly pinned against his stomach, the sheets bunched oddly against his stomach and thighs. Hair brushed against his face, tickling, and he stopped his thrashing, breathing deeply, smelling something other than rot and blood in front of his face. Soap. And there, when he breathed with his mouth open, he could _taste_ Kanda on the air in front of him, even if he had yet to focus on the older man's face.

The room was very dark, so much that Kanda's eyes reflected oddly at him, showing him where to look. "Che." He made out the flash of fangs in front of his face, each one a little dot of white in the darkness above him. "Are you alright?" The whisper sent only slightly warm breath across Lavi's face, made his breathing slow. Tension that Lavi hadn't known was there ran out of his shoulder and arms and he sighed, relaxing his hands against the mattress.

"Yeah. Sorry." The words came out shaky, his hands slipped downward to grip Kanda's as he produced them, and he shivered, taking in another much needed breath before he closed his eye. The man above him relinquished his left hand and instead laid the cool appendage on the side of his face, sliding into the apprentice Bookman's hair. Lavi moved his free fingers to Kanda's chest to embrace him loosely and comfort himself in the closeness of the older man's body somehow, even if he didn't really understand what he was doing beyond instinct. Kanda let him.

"You didn't wake me up. I can't sleep." The Japanese man admitted quietly. "Don't worry about it. Just…" He shifted and Lavi shifted with him until the two lay together facing each other, Lavi's arm still draped around Kanda's back, Kanda's hand still petting at the redhead's hair. "You have nightmares?" The samurai's voice stayed very soft, quiet enough that the apprentice Bookman felt he could ignore the question if he didn't want to answer it.

With a little rock toward Kanda, Lavi cleared his throat to make his whisper easier to understand. "Not a lot. I did, after the Ark. Gramps tried to fix it but there are some things that don't _fix_ very easily. I haven't had one in… a while. It's ok though. I'll get through it. Eventually." He smiled, turned a bit to the side and snuggled closer, making himself to fit as best as he could against the smaller man. "Why can't you sleep?"

"It's night." Kanda said at once. The Japanese man moved to accommodate him, draping an arm around his shoulders until the two were nearly spooning once more, Lavi taking the front this time, Kanda's chin wedged into his shoulder. The redhead didn't care where he was or how the older man moved as if to defend him, he only cared that he felt very safe in the dark haired man's arms. "I feel like I should be hunting something, even if it's only an hour before dawn. Don't offer, I'm not hungry." Tenderly he kissed the side of Lavi's temple and settled against the mattress, relaxed regardless of his words to the contrary. "Go back to sleep." He mumbled, and pressed his left hand into Lavi's palm.

"You just gonna snuggle me while I do?"

"Che. Yes."

"Aw, you're cute, Yuu-chan."

"Shut up. You can't sleep with your mouth yammering."

"I don't know if I _can_ sleep now."

"Then just be quiet. Meditate. Don't talk."

"Why not?"

"Because I like silence."

"Oh." Lavi let out a soft sigh and leaned back a bit, enough to look back and up at Kanda and pull him down into a gentle kiss, short and almost innocent. The two of them sharing the same bed wasn't at all awkward for a number of reasons, not now that they were clean, fed, and somewhat used to the idea of physical contact.

Allen had come up early and dropped off the food that Lavi had requested before going back down again for seconds – as far as Lavi knew the boy hadn't come up again, unless it had happened while he was sleeping. For that reason he coaxed Kanda closer, pulling the smaller man down as he turned so that most of the samurai's weight rested crookedly on his chest.

Kanda made a soft sound of discontent as he pulled away, eyes flashing once more in the dark light. "Do you want to tell me about it?"

Lavi rolled the idea over in his mind for a moment, weaving his fingers between Kanda's. Their hands were close enough in size that it didn't feel strange or stretch his slightly thicker fingers too far to do it: it felt nice, but all the same it didn't reassure him that a dream like that was something to be shared so intimately. He wanted to. He wanted to explain his fears and have them soothed away, but he didn't want to tell Kanda that his dreams revolved around death, the inability to feel, and losing him – it was an emotional idea that he did not know how to handle.

Besides, how stupid would he sound complaining about dead people he didn't even know?

"No, I'd rather not. You can just… stay where you are. You know, huggin' me." He let out a sigh and squeezed the hand in his. The hand squeezed back. "I like how you hug me…" He mumbled, which caused a soft chuckle into the turn of his throat.

"So you haven't figured it out yet?"

"Figured what out yet?"

"Che. Never mind." Kanda breathed in a deep breath for a moment before he let it out slowly, painting a line with his air down the side of the redhead's neck. When he got to the base of it he turned his face downward so he could press his eyes to the warm skin there, a means of soothing himself with the apprentice Bookman's body heat. Kanda wasn't room temperature – even if he breathed less often and pumped less blood than was normal, he still caused more heat than the air around them – but the difference in their body temperatures was still enough for that. Leaving himself as he was he went on, changing the subject as not to drag Lavi into a conversation he wasn't prepared to have. "When we get back, after you tell Bookman about us, I think…" He paused to gather his courage, swallowing his pride. "I think we should keep our rooms separate for appearance's sake but… you can stay with me whenever. If Bookman will let you. And you want to. Or if you just feel like you should. Unless I'm mad at you. Really mad, like I'll kill you. Because I don't want to." He stopped there, hating how everything had come out, and bit the tip of his tongue with his flat front teeth for a moment. _Why_ did he have to sound so unsure? He was sure. He wanted this. Was it just too hard to sound like it?

"Yuu."

"Hm?"

"I think…" Lavi rolled away enough to roll back and face him, looking up with the sort of expression he wore when he was about to say something stupid. "I think… did Allen come back?" He asked, unable to see for himself and unable to say what he meant in front of the younger Exorcist.

"Che. Got up for a snack about ten minutes ago."

"Oh. Then… I think… there's no saving me now." Lavi said vaguely, changing his grip on Kanda's hand to something more comfortable for their new angle. The samurai let him, looking down with furrowed eyebrows and his eyes abnormally wide. "You know how I tried to explain to you that I'd never worried over someone or wanted someone like I worry over and want you? It's worse now. When you touch me, you… make me feel happy. And there's something _else_. It's like… every time you say something, every time you smile, a little part of me smiles too, but it's not my face. It takes up my whole body and I just… maybe my brain is a few steps ahead of my…heart, but…" He shook his head and squinted his eye shut, "I don't know what it is. I think—"

"Lavi," Kanda interrupted softly, "You don't have to explain it to me. You've never been through this before and you're not sure about your emotions, I understand that. I've never loved anyone either, but I've still known what it was. Besides, not everything is black and white – you can feel for me without being able to call it _love_ yet. That doesn't hurt me." He leaned forward, bringing his face closer to Lavi's, watching the redhead's emerald eye in the dark. It stayed shut to him, unreadable, but he didn't mind that much, the line of the apprentice Bookman's mouth told him enough. "Having you tell me that you don't is good enough." He breathed the words almost painfully and they hung between the two Exorcists for a moment, clinging in the air longer than words had any right to.

Lavi turned his face down, refusing to meet Kanda's gaze. "What _is_ love?"

"Accepting someone regardless of their faults, among other things. I don't know exactly, look it up."

"_A passionate feeling of romantic desire and sexual attraction,_ that's the definition."

"Che. All of those big words and it doesn't say shit." Kanda snorted. He laid his left hand on the side of Lavi's face and turned it up to him, just enough to make the redhead open his eye in curiosity. The apprentice Bookman leaned up and accepted the kiss he offered, shivering at the touch of tender, cool fingers against his cheeks. The Japanese man felt the younger man shyly nibble at the bottom of his lip and curved his fingers around the back of his neck, drawing him in, almost desperate, needing what he wanted instead of wanting it. The kiss broke but he guided them into a second one, moving his weight at the feel of a hand on his chest, curious and softly trembling. Springs creaked in the stillness, fabric ruffled, and Lavi grunted in the back of his throat as Kanda's fingers found the hem of the shirt he wore as if to proposition him about its removal. The third brush of lips might have been shallower but it didn't stop Kanda from placing a knee between Lavi's, the sheets tangled between them.

The redhead fumbled with his shirt and threw it over the gas lamp in an effort to be rid of it. Kanda was already gliding down his chest.

"Yuu, are we gonna—"

"No time. Moyashi is not going to fucking walk in on us the first time. I'll…" Kanda tapered off, moving to look at Lavi's eye instead. The dark didn't matter. He could make out Lavi's expression, his blush, in just the dim starlight leaking under the curtain. "Have I told you that you look… look… good, yet?"

Lavi flattened his mouth into an awkward smile and blushed three times deeper. "Nope. Kinda figured you thought so though, what with the touching."

"Che."

"What are we gonna do if we can't… you know… have real sex?" The redhead demanded quietly, aware how quickly his boxer's were being tugged to his knees and then off, leaving the tangled sheet over his hips and nothing else. Kanda cast aside his own garment, tracing a line down Lavi's jaw with his mouth.

The samurai pulled away enough to smirk crookedly, left eyebrow pulled over the right in an almost sarcastic travesty of a smile. "You have to trust me."

"Yuu-chan… if you suggest getting my junk anywhere _near _your fangs…" Lavi was silenced with a sharp, bruising kiss to his mouth, a caress that made him place one hand in Kanda's hair, the other at the inward curve of a hip. His thumb slid forward at the same time that the lips on his moved away, panting in deep, harsh breaths against his chin. Lavi didn't speak, instead he leaned upward and pulled Kanda low enough to take the top of the older man's ear between his lips and give it a long, warm suck and a brush of his tongue.

He didn't know what he was doing, but the shiver that took Kanda's shoulders told him that he was doing fine.

Kanda cursed that same Japanese word again before it transformed into a growling moan in the back of his throat. Lavi hadn't expected that, not in the least, but it gave him cause to do it again, purring deep in his chest.

_Yuu is so… so…_

"_Kimi... fuck…_" Kanda husked into his hair. The samurai's voice sounded oddly unsteady against Lavi cheek, disrupted by his heavy breathing, harsh and gasping. "If you want to try we can… try. He might leave if we're loud enough." The words got him a soft snort from Lavi before the redhead went down the side of his neck and then back to his ear, leaving a trail of wet kisses in his wake. The older man bit back a gasp at the touch of lips on his earlobe, pulling it between the redhead's teeth. "And _reabe_ my _ear-u_ _arone…_"

Lavi pulled his face back and kicked the sheet away, furrowing his brow up at the older man. "Is that your accent, Yuu-chan?"

"Che. It's your fault." The samurai bit out harshly. He wasn't angry, which was made all the more obvious by how he leaned into the push of Lavi's mouth against his pulse point. His ebony eyes fluttered shut. "Words don't seem important, just saying them. Don't care how they sound." He let out a soft grunt of complaint as Lavi sank back against the bed, leaving his fingers to roam about on Kanda's body without aim or conscious. Kanda didn't mind being read like a novel written in Braille, he minded losing the touch of Lavi's lips against his throat. _"Demo aishiteru, yo."_ He growled, bending to lay his cheek in the crook of Lavi's neck and breathe, drinking in his scent with thirsty lungs. "Which means I love you anyway." His voice tried to crack, but he didn't allow it, not when he wasn't sure why it wanted to in the first place.

"I wish," Lavi whispered up at him, "That I loved you, too. Why does… it hurt to think that I don't? Never mind, don't answer that just please, please, do what you want. I want to be so fucking close to you that I'll feel every little thing you feel like I'm the one feeling it. Because you're so… because you _aren't_ just ink. Because I want this with you – _me_, not some fucking alternative self I we—" His eye closed and he pulled himself upward, clinging to Kanda with a desperateness his prior touches had lacked. The wall, the thing that kept what he felt and what he seemed to feel separate was so filled with holes that he could not tell where what he felt began and what he seemed to ended – it all merged in his mind, buzzing between his ears with a ferocity that made goosebumps ripple up his arms and down his spine. Telling Kanda was the farthest thing from his mind as he jerked the samurai into him, grinding his hips in an effort to have intimate contact, not give himself pleasure.

To Kanda, it looked and sounded like Lavi knew exactly what he meant to say but did not yet know how to say it. Softly but quickly, knowing that they might have an hour and a half at the most, and even then Allen would come back if the sun was up, he guided the redhead into a series of delicate, reassuring kisses and caresses. There were words for what he meant to convey with his fingertips: understanding, affection, love, acceptance – but the list was far too long for him to focus on while he coaxed Lavi into forgetting his uncertainties. His right hand found the _choji_ oil and he pulled it to the mattress, still unsure if it was what they would need.

Lavi let out a loud feline sound when he looked at it and his fingers turned down painfully into Kanda's shoulder blades.

"_Rabi—"_

"Do it, I don't care who finds us." Lavi cut him off. "Please."

The older man sat back a bit, pulling the bottle up as Lavi pushed himself back on the pillows, completely lacking any of the customary shyness that the samurai had grown a little used to. He did not mind its absence, however, and simply smiled at the apprentice Bookman, only half distracted by the legs that parted around his in invitation. He was much more interested in the redhead's expression, his eye so filled with appreciation that Kanda could not help but smile.

Because Lavi was just too stupid for his own good.

"This might hurt." Kanda warned.

"You know to use your hand first right? 'Cause that's a pretty big peg for a _little_ _tiny_ hole."

"Che. It still might hurt. Even with my fingers." He wiggled them as if to show just how thin they were and Lavi just shook his head, an amused expression pulling at his lips.

"It will hurt. But I want you to."

Kanda frowned. "Lavi, I'm sure there are other ways to—"

"Yuu-chan." The redhead said the name with enough force behind it to stop the Japanese man from continuing with his protest. "I _want_ this. I _know_ that I want this. I want _you_ to have this – so stop stalling before we can't do it at all."

Kanda tightened his hold on the bottle before he removed the cap and placed it on the nightstand, then leaned down for one final kiss before he risked ruining the morning for them both. Pouring the oil on his fingers proved rather difficult, more of it came out than he thought would be needed and ran down his palm toward the sheet beneath them. It would have made it if not for Lavi's hand suddenly cupped beneath his, catching the cool, slick liquid against his right knuckles, guiding it almost as if the younger man knew what he was doing. From there the redhead bent his legs and held himself up a bit, shifting more of his weight back on his shoulders while Kanda lowered his wet right hand between them. Kanda's heart pounded in his chest a bit more loudly than normal, a short tingle of anxiety awakening in the back of his mind. They were both new at this, both going on instinct, and he was _scared_ out of his mind of fucking it up.

He put the bottle on the nightstand before he let his fingers brush the sensitive place just behind Lavi's manhood. Uncertainly he moved them lower, going by feel rather than sight. He wanted to see Lavi's face, to know what he felt, so he locked gazes with the redhead as he pushed a very unsure finger softly forward, testing the tight ring of muscle that had been willingly exposed to him. Lavi moved his hands up to hold the Japanese man's arms and furrowed his eyebrows. The tip of a finger wasn't very much at all, but it was enough going in the wrong direction to feel strange.

Lavi hummed in the back of his throat in an effort to find words to express his condition. "That feels really—_hey! That's…_" He swallowed thickly, eye wide, stuck between two very different expressions. Kanda waited for him, digit buried two inches deep, and smeared oil down the length of his finger with his free left hand, trying to move it where it was needed most without looking. The apprentice Bookman relaxed slowly, trembling slightly. "Ok." He said after a moment, "Just… be slow."

Kanda nodded wordlessly and continued to gradually ease his hand forward. By the time the finger was far as thought it should go, Lavi's face bloomed with a deep red blush, his mouth open in an expression that showed anything but pain. "Ready?" Kanda questioned with a little tilt of his head forward.

The redhead's hands, moved to the back of Kanda's neck, playing with the baby fine hairs there. "Kiss me?" The request came out a hardly breathed whisper that the Japanese man could not refuse. He tilted down and touched the apprentice Bookman's mouth with his own, pressing the tip of a second finger beside the first in time with the strokes of his tongue. The redhead might have protested but the sound was lost in the kiss, breaking in a sort of muffled moan. His fingers tangled in the Japanese man's hair, the oil that remained on his hands sticking to the tresses rather than his fingers, not that either of them cared. A slightly back and forward motion on Kanda's part made him pull his head back just to breathe, an act that sent Kanda's mouth creeping down the side of Lavi's neck.

The samurai was careful of his teeth and yet painfully aware of the blood rushing beneath the skin that touched his lips, pulsing with every quickened beat of the younger man's heart. With a finger and two-thirds inside of his lover – and they were lovers now, regardless of everything else – Kanda turned his face to look at the knitting of Lavi's eyebrows and paused.

"How does it feel?"

"Kinda like you have your fingers up my ass."

"Che. Great help you are."

Lavi laughed, then stiffened as Kanda narrowed his eyes and slipped yet more of his second finger inward, faster now, given the redhead's attitude. The hands in the Japanese man's hair jerked suddenly and he slumped forward, curling his fingers in an effort to avoid jabbing his fingernails on skin.

The redhead arched suddenly from the mattress, a whining cry in the back of his throat. "Fuck, Yuu…"

"Kan-da. If only when preceded by _fuck_."

"What the hell did you just," Lavi paused to pant. "Do?"

"This."

"_Ngh! _You do that again and there won't be anymore sex tonight. We don't have time to go twice." Lavi grinned at that idea – this happening more than once – and stuck his chin out slightly, indicating both Kanda's hand and his body. "See if you can get another one in there without killing me. And… you're still… hot and bothered, right?" He cocked an eyebrow and snaked his right hand down Kanda's chest, reaching as low as he could without moving his weight from the pillows.

Kanda gasped at the brush of fingertips on the very tip of his arousal, his dark eyes widened at the tease of a thump against the very sensitive slit at the top. Unwilling to become distracted by the touch, he started with a third finger, using the other two to widen the space he had already made. His breath caught in his throat as Lavi's hand tightened, a number of nonsense noises filling the space between them.

The little sound of discomfort Lavi made encouraged him to lean closer again, thinking half about the moment and half about what he felt. With Lavi's legs around him, with one hand touching his erection and the other pulling his head down for a kiss, he wasn't sure that he was leading. His fingers were the ones opening Lavi up to him, teasing the sensitive places he could reach without losing his balance, but the redhead cued him for every kiss and touch, giving of himself wholeheartedly. The gentle place of air on Kanda's face, the little inviting roll to the younger man's hips, the sound of Lavi's heart thumping excitedly in his ears – it all gave Kanda calls to respond to. Like a dance that he was the follower of.

But it was more than that. He also felt like he was being given something very important that he would never be able to give away. Not even if he had wanted to.

"_Rabi_…_"_ He breathed when he pulled his fingers back and pressed them forward again with little resistance, opening them as wide as he could with little response. The redhead let go of Kanda's length and touched the skin of his chest, looking up with unrestrained lust behind his eye. _"Aish'teru."_ Kanda's Japanese was suffering from the moment. _"Boku no koi ga aish'teru."_

"Boku?" Lavi asked very quietly. "Isn't that like… the non-manly-man pronoun?"

"You don't speak Japanese."

"So?"

"So shut up. I'm gonna try this."

"_Gonna?_"

"Stop it."

"I'm rubbing off on you."

"You want me to get up right now? Because I can." _Right. Empty threat. Shit._

Lavi pouted purposely and groaned without meaning to as Kanda's fingers slipped outside of him. He hadn't known how used to the feeling he had been, nor had he realized how much he enjoyed it until it was gone, leaving nothing but a dull ache in the space they had occupied. _"Nya…"_ It fell out of his mouth before he could stop it. "Please… I… Yuu…" Lavi rolled his hips again, his mouth turned down in a sincere frown. _"Shit…_ you're so… please?" His mouth wasn't connected to his brain right, he didn't think, but both let out a keening whine as Kanda fumbled with the oil and smeared it over the length of his phallus, eyes shut to the feeling of his own hand against his flesh. The redhead felt that same, half-painful fire well in his chest and pushed himself up enough to kiss the samurai, nibbling the sensitive inside of the older man's lip while he moved a hand down between them, aiding Kanda's wet hand with its task.

The Japanese man shuddered and hissed, breaking the kiss into a series of short touches, eyes hooded almost dangerously. The redhead teased him forward, assisting with lining things up properly before he let his head fall backward, a loud purr in the back of his throat. Kanda slipped forward as slowly as he thought he was able, watching Lavi's face contort in discomfort, and feeling his own lips part with a feeling the likes of which he had never known. He paused with one hand on Lavi's hips, the other fisted in the sheets, fighting every fiber of his being not to ram is pelvis forward mindlessly. The pressure on the very tip of his erection was almost painful, the surrounding heat enough to drag a sound of appreciation from his throat.

Lavi took a deep breath and sighed. He nodded and the bangs sticking to his sweaty forehead wiggled with the crinkling of his brow. It hurt. It was obvious that it hurt. Still the redhead didn't voice a protest. Instead he reached up and twitched a nipple with his slightly slick fingers, making the samurai's hips jerk forward with enough force to bring a muffled cry to his throat, strangled by the desire to keep quiet.

Kanda leaned awkwardly forward, resisting the urge to finish pushing into that impossibly tight space for the moment, and laid his forehead on Lavi's. The glimmer of moisture in the younger man's left eye made him start to frown, the edges of his open mouth pulled down in an expression of discontent.

"I'm ok," Lavi's voice spread warm air across the bridge of his nose and alerted Kanda to the fact that their foreheads were starting to stick together, cool air drying sweat. "Really, I'm ok."

The Japanese man used his left hand to set the nearly forgotten bottle of oil aside before he touched the side of the apprentice Bookman's face. He stroked a slow line under the boy's right eye and kissed him softly, and a pair of shaking arms held him around his shoulders, almost a hug if not for the awkward angle. "We can stop if it's too bad." Kanda whispered, and he felt an answering chuckle sound against his jaw.

"You said you wouldn't lie to me."

"Che."

The redhead let a half-pained smile take his face. "I still want you. The pain is not so bad that I won't come if you do it the rest of the way." His smile grew as Kanda turned a light pink at the words, amused by his lover's embarrassment. Lavi pushed the man up slightly, encouragingly, and lifted his hips, bending his legs up to press his knees high on Kanda's ribcage. The Japanese man braced himself with his hands on the redhead's shoulders, looking down at him with an uncertain expression. "See if you can find that thing you hit with your fingers, 'kay?" Lavi grinned rather pathetically in his last attempt to abolish his virginity forever.

"Che." Was the only dignified response Kanda could make as he eased his hips forward to the hilt, eyes locked on Lavi's as they narrowed in silent enjoyment and displeasure. The samurai let out a low, half-grunt and stayed how he was. He hated the fact that he knew better than to pull immediately back and then thrust forward again, hated the way that Lavi invited him to do just that with little more than the arch of his back from the mattress, and yet he loved the little quiver to Lavi's lower lip, almost as if he wanted to both cry and smile from the sensations running through him.

Kanda could kind of equate to that.

Lavi let out a low growl and met the next movement of Kanda's pelvis by lifting his own, eye loosely closed, fluttering every so often. It was a strange sensation to him, not wholly good or ill, having something of that proportion slide in and out of him, slow and yet building in urgency, unsteady and yet purposeful. The level of closeness made him feel vulnerable, but the way Kanda responded to his unspoken messages let him know that the feeling went both ways, both of them wearing every emotion and feeling on his face. Lavi opened his eye a bit, just enough to see the shine of Kanda's in the dark. Like shards of obsidian those eyes seemed to glimmer wetly in the darkness, the curtain of hair that fell around them exactly the same color to Lavi's gaze. He could make out beads of sweat on Kanda's brow, the slow changing of his features every moment that they were so close, and _there_, behind the lust, just before the part of his lover that Lavi never wanted to see, was all of the love he could ever imagine, aimed directly at him. Lavi swallowed with difficulty at it. How it was that Kanda could be so very soft and loving beneath the cold exterior of his everyday glare the redhead could understand, but how the man could love _so much_ was a concept he could not wrap his mind around. It was one thing to feel love – it was another to feel it to the point that Kanda seemed to.

"_Mn… fuck…"_ The older man huskily produced the word and rocked forward with a bit more vigor. "S'Goddamn tight I can't…"

The redhead threw his hips upward with a small grimace and was rewarded with a sharp jerk and a whimper; Kanda's eyes squeezed shut, blocking his soul from view for the moment. "Go faster." Lavi advised in a voice that didn't sound exactly like it should be lending itself to more than whispering and drinking hot tea. "You're practically teasing me."

Kanda's weight shifted, pressing more heavily on Lavi's shoulders, and he moved more rapidly, surprised by how tightly Lavi's knees pressed to his sides. The bed squeaked at the new angle, but neither of them minded, too intent on the increased pace of the older man's movement against the younger, too distracted by the sensations and emotions it incited. Lavi couldn't help but feel that somehow, despite his inability to love the man above him, things would never be the same again between them. Lifting himself into the now rhythmic and pleasant movement of Kanda's hips, he knew that this _meant_ something – it wasn't _fucking_ no matter how much he wanted to think of it that way.

The samurai made a harsh clicking sound in the back of his throat and moaned again, lifting Lavi's hips to a slightly better angle. The change, surprisingly enough, brought a loud, gasping sound to the redhead's lips – along with the feeling that Kanda had found that same, sensitive place again. Given a moment to breathe Lavi might have realized what it was, but Kanda's beat began to falter, the heavy way he threw himself into every thrust a testament to what the tightening of Lavi's muscles did to him. The apprentice Bookman wanted it to all happen at once – both of them, together, for some reason, and for that purpose he let go of Kanda and fisted his own arousal fearlessly. Kanda's fingers joined his own, working at an erratic, frantic pace, spinning a thread of tightening heat around the base of his spine.

"_Ra-bi…"_

"_Yes…"_

There was no need for questions between them. Kanda moved unceasingly, pelvis tilted toward that place that made Lavi squint his eye shut. They were both shaking. If it was from the warmth or the tightening of his abdomen, Kanda didn't know, but he could hardly keep himself up as he pulled back and rushed forward again, driving himself ruthlessly onward. He was so close, the heat and the pressure all gathered in his stomach, the fear and the pleasure all gathered in his chest. Beneath him Lavi's hips gave a sudden twitch, the muscles wrapped around Kanda's arousal clamped like a vice on his flesh, driving an undignified sound from his throat. His fingers closed on the redhead's shoulder, bruising, fingernails biting into skin – but he didn't feel it. He only heard the broken sound of his name on the younger man's lips as the wave of pleasure engulfed him, drowning even the sound of their heartbeats thrumming in his ears.

They road it out together, rocking gently back and forth until there was no more reason to and they stilled. Lavi had slipped down the pillows so that he was nearly horizontal, his head tilted back where it had fallen between the two white linen squares of their pillowcases. He breathed heavily through his mouth while muscles he didn't know he had jerked beneath his skin in pleasant little waves, the cool evening air danced gently over his sweat soaked skin, tantalizing his suddenly overly sensitive flesh. He was tired, though not exhausted, and satisfied – he wanted only to gather Kanda against him and close his eyes for a while, the sticky mess on his stomach could be cleaned up later.

He drew in a breath and sighed just as something wet landed on the middle of his chest. Without a sound he opened his eye and looked up at Kanda, who still perched half on his legs and half on the bed, eyes lost behind the shadow of his bangs, the redhead's knees parted to either side of his hips. The samurai blinked and two more drops landed beside the first. Lavi lifted his cleanest hand to touch one, disbelieving for a moment that tears had any right to be falling onto his flesh.

"…th'fuck?" Kanda swallowed thickly as an expression of confusion blossomed across his features. He turned his face away, and tucked it downward, but it was too late to hide it from the apprentice Bookman. Lavi did what he could to reach up and stop him, which made the younger man bend uncomfortably in the middle.

When a palm touched his chest, the Japanese man felt more vulnerable than he had in all of his life. He wanted to do something violent, hit the stupid redhead for making a fool of him, scream, and maybe break something, but that hand stopped him. The apprentice Bookman's fingers, quaking slightly, pulled his face back around, which forced him to do anything but sit there and wonder why it was his eyes had betrayed him. Kanda hadn't wanted to cry, he had no recollection of ever _wanting_ to cry, but it had happened somehow, continued to happen for a moment while he blinked the moisture away rapidly. He wanted to be angry but the defense refused to respond at the moment, not with Lavi's quaking legs curving gently around the slope of his back.

"It's ok," Lavi pushed himself higher as he said the words, but still not high enough to speak soothingly. "Really, Yuu… it's ok." He repeated, and finally shoved his oil covered right hand onto the sheets so he could touch the side of Kanda's neck, pulling him down a little. The redhead was surprised when the samurai allowed him to press their faces almost together, touching their foreheads once more, sharing their air. There were still tears shining in those catlike black eyes, even when they focused on Lavi's mouth.

"Che. Bullshit." The denial was little more than a breath between them.

The apprentice Bookman wet his lips before he leaned forward and just barely kissed the Japanese man, blinking very slowly until his eye simply didn't open again, focused internally. "I think…" He started, his voice wavering slightly with something that might have been an emotion he didn't quite understand. "I think it's sweet." The words came out wetter than he wanted, dying to a whisper, and he felt Kanda stiffen for a moment before Lavi stroked his thumb in a slow circle on the older man's cheek. The Japanese man returned the brush of lips at it, just enough to be felt, and it gave Lavi the courage to go on, still wiping away the wet streaks left by the tears. "Some lucky people just cry like that, there's nothing wrong with it; it's just that you feel more. That you can feel that much, and for me, is… shit, Yuu, I think I'm gonna cry, too." He sniffed forcedly, the admission not quite a lie, and smiled without looking, white teeth flashing behind his lips.

Kanda didn't respond verbally, instead he hooked an arm around Lavi's back and pulled him upward. The redhead sat up with him and slipped back a bit on the bed, leaving his legs over Kanda's in a motion that slid the older man's sex from within him, awkwardly. The samurai made a groaning sound of discomfort and shivered; Lavi grimaced at the sound and feel of it, pulling his lower lip between his teeth as he looked down between them. The sheet was soiled with fluids and oil, and the current placement of his backside wasn't helping any.

Lavi blinked when he felt Kanda's face on his again, sharing the view. "That's… a little gross." He observed conversationally.

"Che. I'd hate to be room service." Kanda's response caught on something like a chuckle, the sound still nearly edging on creepy.

"You think they'll know what it is?"

"Fuck no. If Gil has anything to do with it, they'll think someone threw up lard or something."

"Jill."

"Whatever."

"Hey, it kinda looks like an octopus."

"What?"

"See? There's a little head and the arms are—"

"Are you fucking _analyzing_ my spunk?"

"…Just the shape of it."

Kanda scowled at Lavi, narrowing his eyes to dangerous slits of annoyance. "I'm taking a shower."

-- -- --

What had remained of the night went faster than either of them had anticipated. Lavi had limped his way to the closet where he found a stack of clean sheets to replace the soiled ones with while Kanda showered, and then he had washed himself in a rather hurried fashion when Kanda was finished, not even bothering with more than shampoo and a quick once over with the bar of soap. When he had come out again, damp and tired and in nothing but a towel, Kanda was dozing naked on the bed he had prepared, his hair spread out across a pillow, his breathing slow and even. The redhead had studied him for a moment, memorizing the soft lines of his face and the gentle curve of his jaw, and then slipped into bed with him, skin to skin, tangling limbs and lips alike for a moment until they simply held each other, Kanda's face pressed under his chin. They fell asleep soon after.

Neither noticed that Allen never came back from his snack.

An hour after dawn the British Exorcist sat on the hall floor with the body of his now softball sized golden golem snuggled up under his chin, his eyes flitting as he wandered in and out of uncomfortable sleep. The door itself wasn't the most comfortable pillow, especially not when his face sagged enough to touch one of the bruises against it, but the floor was far worse. Knotted and polished to the point that his pajamas wanted nothing more than to slip and slide on the shiny wood, Allen had to stop himself from sinking down completely almost every hour, ensuring that he never quite got the sleep he really needed.

That might have been a bad thing, but that around midmorning he heard Lavi's panicked voice regardless of the thin, dark veil between reality and his brain.

The redhead woke feeling very well rested, content, sore – very sore, and a bit like he was holding a Kanda scented ice cube to the plane of his chest. When he opened his eye the light stung a bit, and the room glowed a soft white-yellow that cast everything in almost a dreamlike focus, almost foggy, but not unpleasantly so. He smiled a little and stretched his arms over his head before he decided just to listen for a bit while he worked his mind into wakefulness, and maybe thought a bit about how the well of happiness in the bit of his stomach didn't hurt to feel anymore.

That was when he noticed the silence.

With his improved hearing he could make out his own breathing, and slightly removed from that the breathing of someone outside of the door, and beyond that people walking in the snowy streets, carriage wheels creaking and horses snorting in the cold. He stopped there, fearing that he might hear something that wasn't his business hearing, and focused on what _didn't_ make it to his eardrums. Regardless of Kanda's cool arms curled around his body, despite the angelic neutrality of his sleeping face, not even the quietest hiss of breath made it to Lavi's ears.

"Yuu-chan?" Lavi laid a hand on the Japanese man's chest and waited a moment. Feeling no movement, he gave the older man a little rock, fear tightening his lungs and throat. "Yuu? Time to wake up, Yuu… _Yuu?"_ The body beside him didn't even flinch. The fear reached up and curled around Lavi's heart, cutting into him like a knife buried in his flesh. It didn't matter that the feeling was real, that his fingernails were biting into skin and his heart was pounding, that his eye was filling with tears more rapidly than he could understand their purpose. All that mattered – all that he knew – was that Kanda wasn't breathing.

"Fucking wake up!" He screamed the words in a panicked voice, loud enough for Allen to hear him on the other side of the door. Lavi didn't care. He didn't even hear the door as it came open, or the little gasp of surprise behind him. "Yuu-chan! _Wake up!_ You can't die! Won't die! You're too stubborn to die! Now wake—" Lavi pulled his right hand up and began to bring it down, not even sure what he was aiming for, just worried and angry and feeling everything far too close to his heart. _"Up!"_ He brought his fist down into the samurai's stomach, hitting it hard enough to make his wrist zing in protest. The Japanese man made a sound not unlike a groan and breathed in shallowly, eyes cracked blearily open at the redhead.

Lavi felt relief bubble up in his chest and overflow in an embarrassing wave of noisy, strangled sobs.

Kanda made a grunting noise that might have at one point been the sound of the start of a question. "What the Hell is…wrong with you? Wake me up by punching me and then _crying_? Been spending too much time with Lenalee?" It was obvious by his tone that he was still tired – dead tired – and the lazy way he reached out and gathered the redhead to his chest only made it more obvious. "Shut up and let me sleep." He growled, eyes shutting again.

"You stopped breathing…" Lavi tried to explain at the same time that he tried to stop crying, neither of which seemed to work all that well in tandem. "And you wouldn't wake up. I-it was all I could think of… it was all I could—"

"Che. Whatever." The elder man hissed. His hands were unusually tender despite his tone. "I'm fucking tired, _bakayarou._ _Damare._"

"But… you stopped—"

"Vampire, _Baka Koneko."_ The Japanese man half-whispered. He was dangling on the edge of sleep; Lavi could see it in the way his eyes drifted closed again. "I shouldn't breathe at all. Leave me alone."

"But if you don't wake up…"

"I'll die peacefully and sexually satisfied. Go away."

"Yuu-chan!"

"I was dreaming, idiot. Do you think you dream when you die?"

Lavi was quiet for a moment, just looking at Kanda's expression for a moment, studying the tired hollows under his eyes. In the indirect sunlight, with his eyes half open and his lips pressed into a line, the Japanese man looked as frail as Lavi had ever seen him, perfectly incapable of doing more than he already was. With a sigh the redhead leaned forward and placed his lips softly on Kanda's, just a brush of contact before he pulled away, running his finger's through the older man's bangs. "Go to sleep. I'll trust you to wake up, if you really think you will."

Kanda che'd without actually managing to open his mouth. "I will. Otherwise I'll never fuck you again."

"That's totally a reason to live."

Kanda shifted a bit against the mattress, the better to fit the groove he had formed in the shape of his body. "Love you." His voice was smaller than it had been, his eyes closed, and he let out a slow, dying sigh that his chest didn't lift again from. Lavi leaned forward and pressed his face to the samurai's heart, hearing it beat slowly despite the fact that his lungs were no longer taking in air. The beat was steady, solid, unchanging, and the design on the Japanese man's chest felt oddly warmer than the rest of him, the same temperature of a living, breathing, functioning body perhaps.

Lavi closed his now drying eye and let out a quiet, shaking sort of mew in the back of this throat. "Yeah. I know."

**-- -- -- Omake! The Real Reason Kanda was Seme -- -- --**

The Japanese man allowed himself to be pressed against the frame of the bed, his fingers buried in the redhead's pants to the middle of his palms. They weren't close enough. Even lifting his hips into the hand that cupped his arousal and sliding his tongue across the younger man's, they weren't close enough.

With a whine of frustration the apprentice Bookman began to work at the samurai's clothes, shoving them aside with a desperateness that made Kanda shiver. The hand came back as soon as his pants and boxers were gathered around his knees, bunching uncomfortably. They did not matter however, when Lavi _**rapidly**_nibbled down the side of his jaw, _**leeching**_ away his ability to properly work open the redhead's buttoning pants. At last, panting heavily, shaking with anticipation, he pushed his lover's garments away and stopped.

"What the fuck is that?"

"Huh?"

"Since when does _that _have… have…"

"_BARBS_?!"

"Yes! Since when does your penis have barbs?!"

"Those were _not_ there earlier!"

"And like _hell_ you're sticking _that_ in me!"

"We can lube it! I'm sure if we lube it—"

"Right after we _shave_ that shit with Mugen."

"Yuu-chan! No! No Mugen! We've been over this!"

"Then switch me places Cat-Member, or no sex for the rest of your natural life."

---

**For the record, cats have barbed penises – supposedly to cause ovulation and discourage females from having too many partners. Pretty gross, huh? And you thought catboys were bottom by default because they're cute…**

**Also, **_**leeching**_** and **_**rapidly**_** are in italics and bold because Asshat Productions, a site run by my close friends Sailorlight22 and SisterWicked, experienced a problem with their site host when posting chapter 58 of my other fiction, **_**The Fine Line**_**. Those two words (which appeared in the chapter) have been banned from use on the same page by the host company, which caused the URL reroute somewhere else – and I am sorely disappointed in the company for that. It's crapping on my artistic freedom 0fees people, come on! I ignore English grammar, what the Hell makes you think I'll listen to you and your list of words that can't be posted together? What's next? **_**Erection**_** and **_**fisted**_**? **_**Lube **_**and **_**oil**_**? **_**Mother**_ **and **_**fuc—**_

**Anyway! I hope you enjoyed it! The lemon came out a little differently than intended, but that's ok. I still like it. Even if Lavi's a sicko with his Rorschach sperm test.**

**And… I wonder what Tim was doing while Lavi and Kanda did their thang? O.o Oppie doodles. Heh heh heh… ^^;;**

**I hope you liked it! Reviews are lovelovelove! Seeya next chapter! 8D**

**Last Note: I KNOW people are waiting for TFL, but I kind of want to write the end before I post more… I'm sorry for the delay. D: I will do it. I promise.**


	19. Stupidity and Impingement

**Yo!**

**Not a whole lot to say this time… besides…**

**Lil Imhotep will no longer be named as such if male. He will be called Edward Alaric. Ya'll know what that sounds like to me?**

**A lot happens this chapter. I spent quite a bit of time with Kanda, and a little bit more time than normal with Allen, so overall, I think everyone's getting the fic time that I wanted them too. It's strange but, the more I write them, the more I look at their personalities, and the more I start to wonder little things about how they would be outside of the universe in our heads. Am I crazy? Or do other people think like that?**

**Disclaimer: I do not own D. Gray-man. If I did… I think Lavi would be more touchy feely. As would Kanda. P:**

**Warnings: Mild blood. Another irritating ending. A little naked, but not enough extravagant. Jumpy pacing.**

-- -- --

Part Eighteen: Stupidity and Impingement

The indirect sunlight was a hue between off-white and yellow, reflected almost crimson from Lavi's hair, creating the illusion that the fringe of his coat matched it almost perfectly. He wasn't wearing the jacket – indeed it was lying on the floor by the foot of the bed – but Allen could still make the connection between the two. What it was that he had witness between his two friends, however, he did not. Kanda had said _love_. Lavi had _cried_. And now the two of them were lying together, wrapped in each other's arms, Lavi's face pressed to Kanda's chest. A part of the British boy wondered if it would be mean to drag the redhead away from the Japanese man with work, how they held each other made the idea seem rather cruel, but he knew he had to. Even as Lavi shifted into the older man's hold, Allen knew that he couldn't just stand and watch forever.

"Maybe I'm stupid," Lavi said so quietly Allen almost didn't hear it. "Because now that we've… and I'm… all I feel like… I can't even talk about it when you're sleeping." The redhead sighed and curled more tightly around the smaller Exorcist, shaking slightly. Allen felt fear settle in the pit of his stomach, along with the feeling that he shouldn't be watching. "I wanted this with you. I wanted to… have this. But I dunno…" Lavi tapered off and yanked the covers over his head, hiding under the blue fabric as if it might defend them both from what he was saying as well as the slightly chill morning air. "How come I don't want to go anywhere, even though I know you won't wake up until tonight?"

Allen rocked a little and the floor squeaked softly, his knee came into soft contact with the door. For a moment he fiddled with his gloves (slightly glad he had thought to put them on before going for a snack the night before) while he waited for Lavi to look up and yell at him, or kick him out for intruding, but instead he heard nothing more than a soft, delicate sigh. The redhead must have heard him earlier, what with how the lump that had become of the older boy didn't so much as wiggle in response.

"Allen-chan, am I being retarded?"

The British boy opened his mouth and rocked on his feet again, then closed it and rocked back. It took him the greater part of a minute to convince his tongue to form the words as he willed them. "I'm… not entirely sure that I know exactly what you're talking about." He answered as vaguely as he was able.

The lump jostled on the bed for a moment before Lavi's left foot came out of the blankets and then slithered back again, tucked out of sight. "Can you… uh… hand me my boxers?"

"Wh-where are they?"

"Er… Yuu-chan might have thrown them toward the foot of the bed… maybe…"

Allen moved awkwardly forward until he saw a square of blue-white cloth poking from what seemed to be a pile of rather dirty sheets. He swallowed thickly as he picked it up and held the underwear out to the hand that came from under the covers, completely the same as it had before, accept that it might have touched a few places it hadn't previously. The garment disappeared under the blanket and Allen stepped away only to have it come out a moment later at his feet.

"Lavi?"

"Those are Yuu-chan's."

"Oh…"

The redhead's mussed hair and slightly crooked ears poked from the top of the bed, listening first toward the door and then toward Allen before he let his face and neck escape the covers. The apprentice Bookman smiled at the British Exorcist, his eye dancing with something like inner fire, and a soft laugh seeped from his lips. "Mine are a _little _bigger. Hey… you kinda look like you might throw up, are you feeling ok?" He turned his head a little, following Allen's eyes, and found himself looking at Kanda's bare chest and an arm, the skin of which might have qualified as corpse gray. With a little sigh the apprentice Bookman reached down and brushed a strand of those black silk tresses with his fingers before he laid his palm over the Japanese man's heart to felt it pumping at him, slow but still going.

"Did you two…" Allen stammered for the right word, and so made a vague, vulgar gesture with his hands, blushing all the while. His innocence – and perhaps his naïveté – made Lavi smile at the little way he dropped his hands to his sides and looked away, still just as pink as he had been a moment before, his hair nearly silver in the brightening light.

"Yeah. Thanks for, you know… not walking in to make fun of me." Lavi chimed, and lifted an awkward hand to smash down the equally awkward bumps in his hair. He once again had the urge to lick the back of his palm and then run it across his head, but he resisted the urge with no small amount of concentration, narrowing his eyes at it slightly, frowning. He hadn't had more than a feline instinct in the last day or so, why it would creep up _now_ he didn't quite understand.

Allen crouched down before throwing another pair of underwear at him. "Why would I make fun of you when I can make fun of _Kanda_ so much more easily?" He asked, and he grinned a little at the thought, evil ideas forming behind his metallic eyes even as Lavi pulled his undergarment beneath the covers and slipped it on, eyeing the British Exorcist's smile.

"Because I was takin' it like a man, Allen-chan. And likin' it."

Allen froze, blinking at him, mouth slightly round with surprise. The younger boy seemed to be forming images in his head and then rejecting them, unable to produce words in the meantime. Finally he bit his lower lip and turned his chin toward the floor. "Well… congratulations? No… um… I suppose I haven't ever imagined the two of you _banging_ properly, but that might have to do with my complete lack of imagination when it comes to buggery."

"Then why'd you offer vegetable oil?"

"Lavi, I'm trying not to insult you."

"Nothing worth insulting me over. Have at it."

"You're campy gay man and you have queer hair?"

Lavi snorted softly. "Never mind. Please, insult Yuu-chan. _Queer hair _will make much more sense on him." With the words he looked back at the Japanese man and sighed, feeling a little fire of happiness burn in his chest at the sight of him. It was odd to him, but somehow the samurai was more important now, but he didn't think that sex had done that in and of itself – the reactions, the things they had said, the _emotions_ had done it to him. The lines of Kanda's chest were somehow more satisfying than they had been, the curve of his throat and the angle of his jaw the same, the lift of his cheekbones and the spacing between his eyes also. The way his hair had dried, his bangs were slightly less than straight but Lavi didn't mind that either – he just felt that he liked his lover's hair, and someday he wanted to brush it without being murdered in the process.

_Lovers… it even has the word in it._

"Lavi?"

"Before we get ready… can I ask you a question, Allen?" Lavi was distinctly serious, but he didn't move his gaze from Kanda's face, instead he reached out and touched it, following the arch of the man's eyebrows with his fingertips. Allen watched the redhead's ears sag against his hair and nodded even though he didn't think the apprentice Bookman could see. "How do you explain love?"

The white haired teen was quiet for a moment. It seemed to Lavi that maybe it was a stupid question to ask someone so young, but he couldn't be sure – not when Allen rocked first forward and then backward on his feet in the corner of his eye. After a moment the younger Exorcist curled his arms around himself and sighed, a strange, fake smile taking over his features. "It's… honesty." Allen said very quietly, and he shifted back and forth on his feet as if unsure. "If you mean the kind of love I think you do, it's… did… Kanda say…"

A simple nod was all Lavi needed to give.

"He really means it then." The British boy said at once. "He doesn't talk and pretty much acts like he doesn't care about anything, so for him to admit it is…"

Lavi nodded again and turned back to Allen with a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Thanks Allen."

-- -- --

The town, which had come to life at midmorning, took a short reprieve in the time between afternoon and evening, the people gathered mostly indoors, the streets slightly more than empty. It was during that slow time of the day that Kanda woke to find a young man standing over him with hands pressed over his mouth, crystalline eyes shocked wide, the mop of his unruly strawberry blond hair hanging down over his ears. And wearing a tan apron for some reason, breathing in billows and sighs, perhaps he was frightened of something that the newly wakened Japanese man hadn't noticed yet. Either way, a heartbeat, body heat, the _smell_ of a person – it all dragged Kanda out of sleep prematurely, keen and cutting into his pleasant dreams with irritation. He didn't know this person or want him here. And it didn't help that the moment he opened his eyes he felt _hungry_.

He didn't care really. With a growl he pushed himself to sitting, and narrowed his eyes at the kid – maybe he was thirteen, Kanda couldn't really tell, eleven perhaps, smaller than Moyashi. Almost at once the intruder stepped back only to be stopped by the opposing bed.

"Che. What do you want?"

"I-I-I-I…" The boy floundered helplessly for a moment before his hands fell to his apron and began to wring it, wrinkling the material and causing it to _squeak_ softly under his grip, a sound that grated at Kanda's ears. "I thought you were dead." He finally managed to get the words out of his mouth – the _worst_ words that anyone could have said at that moment. Kanda already knew that he apparently didn't breathe in his sleep, the last thing he needed to do was explain to this annoying, skinny, freckled little Lavi-Allen-lovechild that he had been affected by a supernatural substance that had turned him into a vampire.

"I'm not. Obviously. What do you want?" He repeated the question and hardened his eyes a little. He wasn't pissed yet. He was just tired. And hungry. As long as he kept that in mind, he didn't care that the boy's hands shook when he reached into his apron pocket and pulled out a piece of paper.

The blond offered it with unsteady fingers. "Um… I'm Hilary an-an-and Lavi wanted me to drop this off while he an-an-and Allen went to look at—" He gasped as Kanda snatched the letter away savagely, leaving a long paper cut in the center of his hand. Hilary had been warned that Kanda was not only grumpy when woken he was also changed like Lavi (though no one had told him the specifics) and rather violent when perturbed, but that didn't make _seeing_ it any easier to bear. Hilary looked at his palm and frowned, squeezing his hand as the Japanese man unfolded the piece of paper.

Kanda was unsurprised to see Lavi's handwriting, a bit scratchy but still legible, and a rather badly drawn version of the redhead and Allen standing on a pile of smoldering akuma. The samurai frowned.

_Dear Sleeping Beauty,_

Kanda growled at that and narrowed his eyes at the paper. What kind of stupid nickname was that?!

_Please don't kill Hilary in a fit of rage when you read this._

_Allen-syan and I went back to talk to the Rothchild  
kids about what happened to their stepmother,  
Eva, and I thought I should fill you in about tonight.  
Eva died a couple months ago and her oldest son  
from her first marriage – they forgot to tell us that  
Michael was Eva's estranged son last time – was  
set to inherit an heirloom necklace that he wanted  
to give to his fiancé, Ursa. Eva was buried with the  
necklace. The two of them went to go get it, and  
that was when they vanished._

_We don't know if this is connected at all, but we're  
going to see if there's a groundskeeper to talk to.  
We're not going to the graveyard, but you should  
look for us there if we aren't back by the time you  
can leave._

_Allen-syan is worried that you might be hungry, and  
points out that there's a butcher shop down the way  
if you really need to grab a bite. I'm almost out of  
paper, so you go back to sleep if you can and think  
of me and try not to touch yous—_

Kanda snorted, shaking his head slightly before he skipped the rest of that sentence and went on down the page.

_I'll be thinking of you. Innocently._

_Attracted to you and not sure of the words to say,  
- Lavi_

_P.S. Did I screw up my kana? I can't remember if  
it's –syan or –chan…one of those is backward._

"Che." The Japanese man raised a lip at the idiot's attempt to write the honorifics in hiragana, all of the _chi_ written backward so they looked like badly reproduced _sa_. It was a sad, sickening failure that somehow, despite his dislike of it, made Kanda smile. How retarded _was _Lavi? _Sya _wasn't even a real combination of kana! "Stupid moron." He breathed and folded the note in his hands with his lips pressed into a line.

"I'm dreadfully sorry, if you have some sort of reply I can maybe catch them if my sister is still entertaining them." Hilary said, and offered his right hand as if Kanda might want to take it and use it to pull himself out of bed.

Kanda saw the paper cut, smelled the faintest hint of blood, and lurched for the boy before he fisted one hand in the sheets and caught the other on the nightstand, eyes screwed shut. Hunger gathered in the pit of his stomach and rocked him forward again, but he held on, unwilling to just bite _anyone_ if he could help it. The blond – Hilary – made a little sound of shock and started asking questions, rattling off inquiries like Kanda was even able of opening his mouth at the moment, moving back and for, heartbeat growing in intensity. The Japanese man wanted him to shut up and be still, to quit waving his bloody hand around where it could be smelled, and to just _stop_. It didn't happen. Hilary slowly but surely was working himself into hysterics and Kanda's options were decreasing at the exact same pace.

_God… I'm so…_

The hand was close enough to ruffle his bangs and he couldn't take it, couldn't fight it, couldn't _stand _it anymore. He needed to—

"Ah!" Hilary's little scream was drowned by Kanda's hand on his mouth, the breath in his throat stopped by fear. Kanda looked down at him red-eyed and serious, fully aware of just how terrifying he had to look with his fangs hanging over his lower lip.

"I need to bite you now or I'll kill you later." He stated the words in a way that he thought would keep from there being any argument, but there were still hands on his sheet covered chest, pushing him away. "I don't like the idea either, but your hand is bleeding and I can _smell_ it. If Lavi were here, I'd take his, but right now I just need…"

"_Blood?"_ The word was almost too soft and distorted against his palm to understand.

"_Yes…"_ Kanda let the word hiss from his tongue and leaned forward, picking out a place on the younger male's neck, aware that he _wanted_ it, as much as he didn't like it, he _wanted_ to bite something. He could smell fear, taste it on his tongue, and nearly shivered at it, the flavor somehow pleasant in his mouth.

The door opened just as the Japanese man reached for the shaking boy's throat.

"Yuu-chan!" At the sound of his name Kanda stopped with his jaw hanging open and turned, his black eyes blinded with yellow sunlight. He balked, gathered the white sheet, and threw himself to the far side of the bed, Hilary slipping from his fingers with something like an ill strangled sob. In a moment Kanda was on the floor with his face pressed to the side of the bed, his eyes narrowed with a combination of pain and hunger. Kanda growled low in his throat, feeling the footsteps on the floor rattle through his spine and up to his skull, pounding through his eyes. He smelled Lavi before he felt the heat of his body come closer, just short of touching. The younger man's heartbeat slammed in Kanda's ears.

In a rush the dark haired man turned and grappled for the redhead, yanking him down with a growl of what might have been desperation. He would have asked if Lavi was alright with it, would have questioned why it was that the younger man had returned so soon after the delivery of the note, would have warned that he was too single-minded at the moment to think beyond his desire and the thing that would fulfill it. Instead he found himself pinning the apprentice Bookman, one hand in his hair, the other pressed up under his jacket and shirt, fingernails scraping skin. The world narrowed to the pained little sound in Lavi's throat, his heartbeat, and the heat he gave out, the touch of hot skin under Kanda's palm.

He thought about what had happened between them the night before as his fangs sank into flesh.

It was must the same as last time, but that Kanda didn't need to be encouraged. He drank wholeheartedly, the sound of crying and shushing behind him, Lavi's hand petting through his hair, and blood seeping between his teeth and over his tongue. The redhead was talking to him, soothingly. He couldn't focus on any of the particulars until he had drank four good gulps, each one deeper than the last.

"Y'almost scared Hil to death you know," Lavi was saying, "I forgot to tell him that you might – Yuu-chan, your hand is _very_ cold and _very_ close to my—_oh…_" He made a soft, airy sound that might have been a whimper and thumped his head back against the floor, and his hands buried themselves in the length of Kanda's hair. His right leg bent until his boot thumped on the floor, louder than it should have been. "Don't do that and bite me, the kinky level is _way_ too high to be natural." As he whispered his fingers found the curve of Kanda's neck and began to stroke it, almost the way he had before, only now from a different angle. The Japanese man moved his hand downward until he found the buckle of Lavi's pants and held on to it, more because it gave him something to do with his hand than because of some neurotic need to be touching sexually. The hand he had in the redhead's hair gripped a bit more firmly.

Allen's voice sounded softly from the door, obviously distracted by something in that direction. "Lavi?"

"I'm ok!" The apprentice Bookman called back at once. "Yuu-chan should be too, in about a half-pint."

"How much did he need last time?"

"Not sure. Wasn't enough to make me dizzy though."

_I had pork blood before though… so I should…_ With a growl Kanda pushed himself back, fighting down the urge to do more than lap the wound he left until it stopped oozing. The hunger was dulled but still burning in the bottom of his stomach, warning him that if he saw more of it, if he smelled it up close, he'd bite again regardless of his will. With a clamped jaw and a loud, outward breath, Kanda moved himself away, Lavi's hands catching in his hair.

The redhead was over him in an instant, red scarf dangling from his neck, covering the little bloody place he had left by accident. To the Japanese man's mild surprise Lavi pulled him up and leaned him on the bed, holding him by the elbows, piercing him with a cold green eye. Kanda felt a wave of tiredness come over him and ignored it, paying attention instead to how close the redhead leaned and the slow, hot press of a mouth against his own, slightly open, inviting. He took the invitation, left hand jerking the larger man against him.

They parted with Lavi half-straddling Kanda's left thigh, panting, his fingers buried in the samurai's hair again. He turned his face down, breathing moist air into the line of the older man's hair, and watched Kanda look up at him with red-fogged eyes and blink. The look warned of hunger but the Japanese man seemed calm, the arms he lifted to entwine the younger man made Lavi melt against him, draping his torso against Kanda's, shading him from the indirect evening light. The soft press of slightly parted lips on Kanda's jaw made him turn his head, letting the larger man gather him in an undignified heap against his chest, midnight-red eyes drifting shut. The apprentice Bookman gave him just as much weight in return so that he wasn't sure exactly who was holding up whom anymore, only aware of the fact that that together, neither of them could fall.

"You're still hungry." It was a statement rather than a question, spoken against the line of Kanda's neck. The brush of air was so warm it made goosebumps blossom across his left arm and down his spine. "It's alright if you need more, really."

Kanda shook his head, knotting his hair against the soft azure of the displaced comforter. "I'll get something from the butcher's when the sun goes down." The whisper came out cold so that it made Lavi hold him closer as to warn him.

"Promise?"

"Che. Yes." He said them without really meaning to, focused for the moment on the hand wandering down the center of his chest. "What are you doing?"

"You're cold," Lavi answered unthinkingly. "Can I kiss you?"

Kanda furrowed his brow and looked slightly upward at the redhead, yet unrecovered from his desire to bite and still distracted by the _very_ warm hand on his stomach and the fact he was _naked_. A sheet wasn't a lot between his lower half and Lavi's pants, even if it was made of cotton. "Why are you back?" He diverted the request rather than answering it, and his hands pulled Lavi into a slightly less awkward position against him, both leaning slightly more on the bed frame, arms still tangled. Kanda wanted not only to know why Lavi was back, but also to speak of the events from the night prior – there were some things that neither of them had said, things that he could tell.

Lavi's right hand moved to his mouth where he yanked off his fingerless glove with his teeth before touching the Japanese man again, carding his hands through the tangles of Kanda's tresses. "We went to the town hall and checked the registrar – there's no groundskeeper for the churchyard, or even a priest at that church. That's why it's so freakin' ugly. Both of them disappeared around the same time as Michael and Ursa." He took in a short breath and lowered his lips toward Kanda's, painfully close without touching. "Really, can I kiss you? It's driving me nuts thinking about it. And we jumped on my hammer to get back – I was worried about what would happen if you woke up starving like you did." Finished with his story, his eyes focused on Kanda's lips and he waited, still touching the samurai's hair, still floating in the limbo between pulling away and leaning in for a kiss.

"I see."

"Yuu-chan…"

"Moron. Don't ask for something like that. What do you think last night was? Exercise?" Kanda paused to breathe before he went on into a short lecture about the stupidity of the apprentice Bookman in front of him, but he was cut off by the gentle press of lips on his own, slightly firm, very purposeful. He touched back with the same pressure and tilted to the right, guiding Lavi against him, answering unspoken request to caress the redhead's hair. This time he was aware of every push against his flesh and every brush of his own against Lavi, and when the flat of his back connected with the side of the bed, he knew that the redhead was leaning over him, the opposite of what had happened the night before.

Lavi pulled away and looked down at him, eye half hooded, bottom lip slightly pink from kissing. His flicked over the Japanese man's face and paused at his eyes, moving between them. "Um…" He started, but pulled his lip between his teeth and stopped, looking downward. "How ya feelin'? Besides hungry, I mean. I've been limping since last night, but it's not as bad as I thought it was gonna be." For a moment he faltered, thinking about moving back, before he moved forward slightly, pressing his face to Kanda's in a very catlike gesture of appreciation. The samurai didn't mock him for it or push him away and instead reached between the younger man's ears and began to stroke at them, drawing him against his chest.

"Tired," Kanda grumbled in answer, and he spoke over the purr in Lavi's throat. "I don't need to sleep before nightfall, I just feel… off." Lavi began to knead at his chest, softly, and Kanda looked down at him, still running his fingers through the apprentice Bookman's hair. The redhead looked almost content, but that his face was devoid of emotion. He continued to purr, softly. "Have you figured things out yet?"

"Still don't know what things you mean…"

The samurai sighed and shook his head, his hand grew still. For a moment silence spread between them, broken by Lavi's catlike noises and Kanda's slow, unnecessary breathing. The older Exorcist let his eyes fall shut and Lavi's hands grew still, his legs pulled closer to his torso almost as if he wanted to be a perfect ball, or perhaps fit all of his body against the Japanese man's chest. When the movement failed he went back to how he had been, leaning with all of his weight on Kanda. The samurai knew at once that the little light feeling that blossomed in his chest had to be affection for the redhead sprawled across his chest, and the little sound that the apprentice Bookman made was somehow similar, like a sigh and a laugh at once. It made him _want_ to smile.

"Che." He gave Lavi's right ear a little flick that made it quiver, and breathed out through his nose. What did he look like? A cat bed? "Oi. Get up, _Aho_." He flicked the ear again, a little harder, but got no response besides another little twitch and the slight lifting of Lavi's right eyebrow. An idea struck Kanda then and he lowered his hand to the side of Lavi's face and stroked his cheek, grazing the edge of the eye patch. "If you don't wake up I'll—"

"_Please don't..."_ The words were against Kanda's chest, very soft, and he drew his hand away, listening. They sounded almost awake, if not for the soft way they tapered into a breath. _"Don't… need… why did…" _It was much like the nightmare, only now the redhead wasn't fighting like mad and panting, he was clinging, and talking in a small, boyish voice. _"…want to…love…"_

"Hey!"

Lavi blinked his eyes open at the nudging of a hand on his forehead, the foggy floor and a large expanse of skin forming in front of his eyes. With a yawn he looked in the direction of the voice that had woken him and smiled, remembering everything that had lead him to be napping on Kanda's chest. With a little tilt of his head he licked the nearest patch of skin to his mouth and grinned even wider at his lover's (it still felt very odd to think of him as that) rounded eyes. The redhead chuckled.

"I needed a catnap."

"And I need _blood_. Would you get off me and go find some?" The glare the Japanese man gave him didn't quite make it to his voice, and the gentle way he pushed the apprentice Bookman away didn't threaten his safety in the slightest. If Mugen had been in reach, Lavi doubted that he would have been threatened with it even if he had said no.

"Oi! Allen!" Lavi called loudly, not even angling his head toward the door. There was a little sound of reply anyway, so he went on as if Kanda weren't looking at him as if he had entirely lost his mind. "Will you run down to the butcher's shop and get some of that stuff Kanda likes?" At least he hadn't screamed the word _blood_ to the inn.

"Sure!"

Kanda shook his head again. "You are a moron."

"That was pretty smart if you ask me," Lavi chimed brightly. He pushed himself up and took the Japanese man by the hands to guide him up as well. It was slow, and Kanda lost the sheet halfway up, but the redhead didn't particularly care that the samurai was naked, and the little blush that spread across the older man's cheeks only made him smile. First he ushered Kanda over to sit on the bed, then he stepped away, gathering pieces of the smaller man's uniform and handing them over in no particular order. "This way I get to spend a little more alone time with you before we go marching into God knows what, ya know? Because… I mean… I spent the whole day thinking." He handed Kanda a shirt that wasn't his but didn't notice. "About what we did and… how I feel. I thought that, if anything, I'd feel guilty but…" He looked back at Kanda, now clad in underwear and an unbuttoned shirt, and took a moment to sweep his gaze from the soft looking skin of the samurai's toes to the mass of his hair, knotted and messily hanging over his shoulders.

"But?" The word was meant to goad him on.

"But I want to know what the meaning is. It's like… that _was_ something. I _felt_ something. _You_ felt something." He brushed a hand through his hair, missing his ears, and then scratched the right one, frowning deeply. The expression wasn't one that Kanda had seen often. The redhead began to pace, back and forth, back and forth, in front of the window. "But I don't feel guilty over it – I don't _feel_ like I took advantage of you, even though I know that technically I did. I wanted you and even if it meant something, it's not the same as… as…" The unconscious clenching of his right hand on his Innocence warned Kanda that something strange was about to happen, but he couldn't imagine what. Lavi centered himself, but continued to move, not looking at Kanda as he spoke. "It's not the same as being in love with someone. Though… if this is this and love is something else, I don't even know how you'd get up in the morning knowing we're going to be in different places. It's debilitating enough having to _think_ about you all the time and _want_ you, I can't imagine _loving_ you on top of that." Floor squeaking beneath his feet, he stopped short and looked at Kanda, his expression crestfallen. He moved his hands in front of him, waving them half defensively. "Not to say that I don't want to – I do want to – it's just that I don't know how I'd do anything without you. Ever." He messed with his hair some more, then finally stated to pace again, growling under his breath.

Kanda just blinked at him, his face perfectly even, no one emotion more powerful than the others. His jacket hung over the white button up open also, but the customary wrapping was missing. The cut of the jacket, coupled with the pants that ended above his ankles, made the samurai look the part of a china doll, polished and set to catch the evening light. Sapphire eyes unblinking, he cocked his head to the side as if the string that held it to his neck was about to snap.

"Fuck, I've hurt your feelings. Please, punch me."

"Lavi…"

"It'll make me feel better. Glare, or something. Don't just blink at me owlishly where I can _see_ it on your face that you care, that's like stabbing me in the gut with Mugen. Be violent." Lavi persisted, and waved his arms to the side to show his discomfort. He was near tears. "Maybe I can't do it. Maybe _want_ and _worry_ and _happy_ and _scared_ all work right, but _love_ and _guilt_ are broken."

"Lavi," Kanda repeated, but he could see that the redhead wasn't about to stop, not yet, not while he had time.

"Just explain that one part to me though, in the interest of helping me. How do you do it? How did you get up in the morning in the Order and not come see me in the hospital wing without killing yourself over it? As it is… if that was you… I'd…" Lavi stopped suddenly, hunching slightly, and laid his right hand on his chest, breathing deeply. He closed his eye, dislodging the tear from it, before he opened it again, just as pained and confused as it had been before. It might have been a form of meditation from what Kanda could see, or maybe hypnosis, either way whatever Lavi tried when he closed his eye and breathed didn't seem to be working. Not in the slightest.

Kanda pushed himself up on his feet and took a step forward, the same floor board squeaked under the redhead's boots. "Lavi—"

"That's not the point though. And I can't… stop… _feeling_—_"_ Lavi came to a sudden silence when Kanda touched him, just the graze of fingertips against his cheek. It might have been a friendly brush, or a loving caress, maybe even something accidental. And then there was another touch, just at the bottom of his ribcage, another slow brush of fingers against his jacket.

Kanda eased into the hug, fighting the urge to bash the apprentice Bookman up the side of the head rather than hold him. "You're the biggest fucking idiot in the entire world." He breathed, and his cool breathe made one of Lavi's ears twitch. "And you think too much."

"Y-yuu?"

"Shut up. Close your eye." He demanded at once, and the redhead followed his instructions, leaning slightly forward all the while. It was nearly perfect, if not for the fact that they were touching. "I'm not going to take you through the process of lengthening your spine and all that, or opening the gates, just think _inward_. Don't use words. Just ideas. What do you feel?" Kanda questioned, and glanced down to see Lavi furrowing his brow in thought.

"Like this is your brand of bullshit."

"Che." Kanda sighed for what felt like the thousandth time and tugged the slightly taller man against him, winding him into a tighter embrace. Lavi returned it over time, half hanging from his jacket, cheeks pressed flush. "The words don't matter, _Baka Koneko._ You didn't _take advantage _of me. What we did… I wanted that." His lips curled up at little. "I still do."

Lavi swallowed thickly, but didn't loosen his hold on the samurai. "How can you say that?"

The dark haired man chuckled softly, eerily, but didn't respond at once. Instead he took Lavi's right hand and simply held it between them, pressed against both of their chests, touching the skin beneath his open shirt softly. "Because it's true, idiot. You're… se-se-se…s-s-se…" Kanda glared at nothing in an effort make his mouth produce something close to the words he had thought to convey. "Attractive. And I… want to be like that with you. It's not something I can explain, I'm not… good at saying things like I mean them. I love you. Because of that, I want to be this way with you. Understand?" He could see clearly that Lavi did not, though it looked as if the redhead was prepared to lie about it, at least a little.

"Is that fair though?" The apprentice Bookman hardly breathed the words. "I should have sex with you because you love me, even though I'm not giving you that emotional part you should get?" He rocked a little, though he didn't seem to notice it, and Kanda felt as if Lavi had closed his eye, even if he couldn't see it. "If I could…"

"Shut up," Kanda bit out almost kindly. For the second time, Lavi did as he asked without question. "You want to be with me, don't you?" His tone was almost accusatory, and for that reason Lavi didn't think it warranted an answer, and so remained silent, letting Kanda go on uninterrupted. "Then do it. There's nothing wrong with that."

"But you said… that it hurt not to have me love you back—"

"It's different." Kanda corrected him quietly. "I'm not telling you how, but it's different."

Lavi didn't argue. He simply stood there, leaning on the smaller man, listening to the slow, steady movement of air through his lungs, the ruffle of his jacket as they shifted. Without meaning to the redhead pressed his neck into the older man's lips, an act that had him bitten almost at once, the moment of hesitation just long enough to warm him of what was coming. Eye open, Lavi stroked a slow hand through the back of his lover's hair and didn't think of anything for the moment, just living in the moment, observing every detail of Kanda's mouth on his flesh, their hearts beating together. It was terribly intimate to him, even with clothes, to be so very close, his blood flowing into the Japanese man's mouth, a heated, living bond between them. Coolness, caused by the press of Kanda's tongue to his neck, seeped up the side of his face and he smiled, realization striking him: would those bite marks be scars when they healed over, a testament to what he had let the older Exorcist take from him?

No, that wasn't right. Kanda hadn't taken anything. He'd only been given things that Lavi was just fine parting with.

"I might not ever be able to say that I love you, Yuu-chan." Lavi breathed against the skin of Kanda's throat. "But whatever else there is, whatever thing a person can give to someone else when they don't have a heart… you can have that. Ok?"

At once the samurai reeled backward, taking a painful hold of the redhead's shoulders. There was blood on his mouth, contrasting with the paleness of his skin, and an emotion that Lavi couldn't read in his eyes, burning darker by the moment. His eyebrows danced together and his feet moved back on the wooden floor, as if he needed to take a predatory stance in order to covey his thoughts through his mouth. A bloody tongue flicked behind his reddened teeth and his swallowed, black eyes focused only on Lavi's face.

"You think—" A loud knock on the door was the only prelude they were given before it was pushed open, and two lightly colored heads of hair poked inside. The taller, lighter of the two slipped inside while the darker stayed where it was, blocking most of the light. Kanda narrowed his eyes at Allen even as Lavi brushed his hands away, shrugging him off in favor of paying attention to the medium sized bottle of blood in Allen's hands.

That much in a single, dark red space made Kanda forget all about what he wanted to be thinking.

Lavi smiled as the samurai wordlessly took the offered blood from the smaller Exorcist and drank it without word or care, their conversation forgotten for the moment.

"So, Allen-chan!" The redhead chimed at the British boy. "We gonna take Hil home before sundown?"

-- -- --

The snow was light, drifting down in long, slow, wavy lines that caught the redhead's eye and dragged it away from the setting sun, glaring like a great burnt orange eye drawing shut at the edge of the world. The horizon was closer here than he remembered it being, mostly because the shadows of the hill the church sat on where not as long in the daylight, and the deep hollows in the thicket of thorns around the staircase had hidden how the building had started to slide down the soft incline, foundations twisted to the point of contorting the entry so wickedly. Now, with the first sprinkling of stars piercing the clouds behind him, Lavi saw that night had already fallen at the farthest part of the graveyard, at the bottom of the hill they had never explored. There, at an angle that made moss grow on all sides of the trees at its base, was a short cliff, shadowing over a number of grave markers and headstones.

The more he studied that place, the less he wanted to go there, though it called to him. The tombstones became more crooked the closer they came to the cliff.

The sun sank away and freckles of white sprouted in a swift but discernible wave overhead, marking the fall of night at the crest of the hill where he stood. Beside him, Kanda cast his hood back and shook out his ponytail as if annoyed with it, black eyes catching starlight and reflecting it gold, the sheet of his hair rippled like black murky water behind him, and a soft scowl spread across his smooth features.

Lavi watched him curl his upper lip back from his fangs before he broke the silence between the three of them.

"Someone should stay at the top of the hill in case we're attacked from behind." Kanda's voice almost didn't carry to Allen; it was obvious by how the British boy stepped closer on Lavi's right, booted feet crunching on icy snow. "Maybe you," His eyes settled on the redhead for a moment. "Being you can move faster than I can and your Innocence sucks against things like us."

"Hey, don't make it sound like I don't know how to fight, Yuu-chan," Lavi protested with an expression not too unlike a pout. His cat eye flicked orange at the Japanese man, contrasting with his hair. "'Sides, I can't go rocketing _down_ a hill on Ozuchi Kouzuchi, I'll fall on my face and with my luck, break it. Ever somersaulted down something steep? Trust me. Not fun. Grass burn sucks." No sooner had he finished that a loud, high pitched howl sounded from the very back and bottom of the church grounds, stiffening his spine and sending him into a hiss that he didn't particularly know the target of. His ears pressed back into his hair line dangerously, the loops of his earrings flashing in the waxing moon's light.

The whole place put him on edge, filled the Bookman in training with the urge to run and climb something, to find a place too small for his body where he could curl up until sunrise. He also, for some reason, wanted nothing more than to sink his teeth into someone and carry them down into that darkness, fresh blood and meat slick in his mouth and sticky on his clawed fingers.

He shook his head in an effort to rid himself of that sensation and instead looked up at Kanda with a frown. "I feel violent." He stated flatly. "It's not like before. This place makes me want meat. Is it doin' anything like that to you?"

Kanda nodded slowly. "I want to hunt something."

"People?"

"Maybe." There was a note of something like uncertainty in his tone.

"We should get this over with."

"_Aa."_

Allen broke in then, laying a hand on Lavi's shoulder gently, and smiled when both older Exorcists turned to him with slightly dazed expressions, as if noticing for the first time that he was the only thing that smelled _human_ around them for a number of blocks. "I'll stay here." He volunteered with a smile. "I can throw myself with Crown Clown and yank you back to me if things get bad. Besides, I'll be of less use against anything caused by Innocence than Lavi will – at the most I can slow something down, but I won't be able to kill it." He paused then, studying the three almost glowing eyes that looked down at him, and forced his sheepish smile not to waver. "And I'm not tasty; please don't look at me like I might be, hm?" He cocked his head to the side and Lavi snorted – a sound that pulled Kanda's eyes away from the British boy for the moment.

"Good idea, Moyashi-chan. And stay as far away from that shadow-thing as you can if you see it. If this falls apart, someone has to be able to go call Komui and tell him why we failed."

"We won't fail." Kanda stated even before Allen could correct his name. "Not now."

With a nod of agreement from his companions, Kanda drew his katana and held it loosely in his right hand, aware that Lavi pulled his rather pathetically sized hammer from its place on his thigh at the same moment. The shimmer of Allen's cowl and the appearance of Tim's metallic wings by his right ear signaled them that they were prepared to go on with their plan, though what exactly that was, none of them really knew. Get into the graveyard and find where the monsters came from, see if they were people, if they fought the undead or joined them – they were all goals that fell somewhere behind the one that would send them all home: finding the Innocence.

Allen watched the samurai and the apprentice Bookman take off into the darkness at about half-speed, weaving between headstones, scanning the muddy snow with eyes that could see far better than he knew his could.

There were longer shadows in some places. The hooting of a winter owl sounded softly from his left. Somewhere in front of him, the same howl rang out again, echoing as if bouncing off of the dome of the hollow sky. Allen felt himself shiver.

He lost sight of Kanda, black uniform and hair blending far too well with the shadows.

"_You came on your own did you?" _The words sent a spiral of fear to his gut and he turned, ripping his claw through the empty air at his right, burying the fingers of a left hand in the dirt. _"Don't fret Pierrot, I don't think I can turn someone with a weapon like yours…but—"_

"Lavi! Kan—" Something nudged him slightly, from the left, and he threw his hand down in an effort to catch something, anything, in his hand. When he connected with nothing he tried to take up his call again, because facing this thing alone didn't seem like a very smart idea, not with how it had hurt Kanda. "Kan—"

"_I think you'll make wonderful bait, Pierrot."_

"What are you—"

"_So tell me…"_ The little hairs on the back of Allen's neck stood on end at the sound of feet in the snow behind him, too many feet, harsh, heated breath spreading at the back of his head. _"Who do you think will come for you first?"_

-- -- --

**Niamh's clifftacular endings strike again! Bwahahaha!**

**Did that feel rushed at all? If it did, I'm sorry. Maybe I can break it apart a little and add some stuff and make this into two chapters, if it's bad.**

**Ehem. Overall, I'm not sure that I liked the whole beginning of this chapter, but it's ok, everything happened that needed to happen, and it's staying about the pace that I want it to, I think. No worries, people who didn't see Lavi's reaction coming, there should be internal workings and lots of um… action of the verbal and violent kind, I hope.**

**I hope you enjoyed it! Thank you all for reading and reviewing! Reviews really make my day.**

**Note: Yeah, TFL is going too, no worries there. It'll be up before too long, I promise. :3**

**Seeya next chapter! ~**


	20. Elucidation and Recognition

**The cliffhanger returns!!**

**I lost some reviews in a comp crash. I'm sorry.**

**This is the shortest chapter in a while, so I'm totally adding more of an author's note to make it seem longer...  
**

**Disclaimer: I do not own the characters of D. Gray – man. If I did, Lavi wouldn't have such a hard time of things.**

**Warnings: Bad action, blood, gore, an anticlimax, Kanda using words longer than thirteen letters long…**

**Enjoy!?**

**-- -- --**

Part Nineteen: Confrontation and Sincerity

It all happened very slowly, even if it only took the whole of four seconds.

One moment, Lavi was jogging down the hillside, searching every nook and cranny of the place for anything out of the norm, anything moving, anything that qualified as a shadow amongst shadows. He sped up when he heard Kanda do the same, choosing to momentarily ignore the sound of his name on Allen's lips. And then he was falling. The ground rushed up at him fast and hard, a short granite gravestone did little more than push the air from his lungs before he hit the snowy mud beside it, sliding down the rough surface with his slightly skewed momentum. Coughing, he fought to push himself up, the burn in his lungs something that he needed to ignore for the sake of forward movement.

Something struck him hard in his ribs from the right, heavy, _breathing,_ and grappling at his jacket with hands that whizzed over the material of his coat with wickedly curved claws, not sharp enough to cut the fabric. He made to retaliate, clenching his hammer in his right hand and shoving it into the creature even before he could see what it was doing.

"_Hi ba—"_ The words fell short when the thing threw him ten feet to the ground and turned away, a great bright refraction of moonlight on white its only act of parting. For a moment Lavi blinked from where he had landed, watching what looked to be the largest snowy owl he had ever set eyes on dig its claws into the dirt and – to his horror – lift a severed human arm from the place he had been standing only moments before, missing three fingers and the connective ball joint at the shoulder.

He checked his fingers. "It's not mine…" He heard himself sigh in relief – and scream in utter, shock and terror.

Hooked in the top of his left boot where three, half rotted human digits, twitching closer to his skin.

It clicked a moment too late. Zombie. A zombie had reached up and grabbed him by the boot in an effort to knock him down or slow him – reached up from _inside _of the ground to do it. The graves had never been empty – only muddy from the corpses clawing themselves to the surface every night for months. They had never checked that little assumption, not after Kanda had stuck his hand and foot into one of them.

And the bird had tried to save him but now it was coming for him. Coming to rip him limb from limb the same as it had clipped the arm of the undead townsman. Lavi felt fear settle into the pit of his gut and hefted his Innocence, aware that there was no time to push himself to standing before it got to him and – most likely – tried to peck off his legs.

He swallowed.

A bang the likes of which Lavi had heard more times than he cared to count rang out over the graveyard, followed swiftly by four more, each one forcing his ears to flick back against his skull at the volume. The snowy owl – which had arms and talon like feet as well as a large black beak and huge white wings – faltered on its feet, a sick, ear splitting shriek bubbling from its throat before it toppled forward in a messy, bloody, white and red heap, the humanoid back a mush of seemingly black flesh and gore, oozing down its sides. Lavi remained immobile for a moment, entranced by the dark figure that, in a series of short, hurried steps, moved onto the struggling creatures back and proceeded to produce a silver gun from its right hand and aim it at the monster's head.

Lavi's lips parted in protest. That was a person, under all of those feathers wasn't it? Just like him? Just like Yuu? "Wait…" His voice cracked, hardly more than a whisper, and he heard the hammer cock as the weapon was leveled more surely. That was one of the children if he remembered right, Rachel? "W-wait…" His right hand was shaking on Oozuchi Koozuchi as the figure's head turned down, showering its shoulders in dreadlocks that reflected gold in the starlight. "Don't you… don't you… kn-know… you shouldn't… that's—wai—" The gunshot cut him off, and he turned his face away with an ill suppressed tremble.

_It was a person… that had been a person and I could have—  
Stop it. You can't think about this right now, it doesn't matter if you're a Bookman or not.  
He shot a little girl. A little girl like Wendy…_

"Hello, _Katze_," Mörder's voice was something he would never be able to make himself forget, not without remembering how Kanda had talked about him coming into the room. Now, when the man looked down at him with slightly purple-blue eyes and pointed the revolver at his face, Lavi wasn't sure if he understood entirely. "Come to collect the shadow have you?" The German man's expression was lost in the shadow of his hat, but Lavi could still make out his eyes, their blinking, their light, their emotion. Mörder was disgusted with him. This was the man who had helped to point them here wasn't it? A man who had fed Yuu during the worst of the change? Disgust didn't make any sense at all.

"What…" Lavi bent his right leg and was rewarded by a bullet narrowly missing the limb, buried in the ground by his knee. "Why are you killing them? They're people under that stuff! Don't you know that?!" It was the least of his problems and the most of his worries at the moment, though he couldn't understand _why_ for the life in him.

Mörder laughed hollowly. "It should be obvious by now, shouldn't it?" He half breathed, and held his left hand out in a sweeping motion, encompassing the whole of the graveyard. The ground, every burial mound and dirt patch that Lavi could see, was writhing with rotting human bodies, grappling at whatever they could find to wrench them from their prisons. Swallowing, Lavi looked from the motion to the man in front of him and then, in utter fright, to the body of the creature that had tried to save him.

A pile of ash.

"What do you have to say for yourself, _Katze?_ Now that you've seen my power?" The Akuma dressed in Mörder's skin questioned, pressing the barrel of his weapon to the apprentice Bookman's forehead. _"Meow_, perhaps?"

"You were in the inn… Allen would have known…"

"The little cursed one? He never looked at me, _Katze_, not even once. That brat trusts his eye too much." Mörder growled, then cocked the gun again, one soft yellow eyebrow lifted over the other, lips lifted in a too-wide smile. "Too late to argue now, isn't it _Exorcist?_" The word was a curse on his lips, thick with anger and something else, something twisted. It was all Lavi could do to open his mouth and curl his fingers more tightly on his weapon's handle.

"_MOVE!"_ Lavi stiffened at the yell, too close to his back, and flinched at the sound of gunfire, expecting the world to narrow into darkness, expecting the projectile to hit him squarely between the eyes, to end it once and for all. But there was no pain and no sudden blackness, no flash of light. There was just the sound of grating metal and the smell of burning gun powder.

Blood.

And there, standing slightly hunched, the middle of his chest seeping dark liquid in a grazing line across his jacket, was Kanda, Mugen held like a sideways shield before him. "What the _fuck_ are you doing, idiot! Napping?! _Move!_" The samurai growled without looking, leaning his weight into the Akuma until his arms trembled. "I don't care what kind of emotional issues you're dealing with, get your useless ass up and _kill_ something!"

"Oh…" Lavi closed his hand on his Innocence, a small smile coming over his face. Maybe then, if he was right, this was _regret?_ "Right!"

-- -- --

Allen had turned in a rush, pulling his Innocence around him in an effort to create the strongest possible defense against whatever it was breathing across the back of his skull. There was no time for an offensive strike, no time to do anything but cocoon himself in Innocence and pray he pulled his hood up in time – and then his eye whirred to life, distracting him for just the faction of a second more than would have been good. His left shoulder took the brunt of the attack, but that wasn't the end of it, a secondary strike caught him in his right calf, stilling his turn before it could even half complete itself with momentum.

He fumbled for a moment before taking the only course of action he could think of – he threw the Innocence outward and made to push whatever was attacking him as far away as physically possible.

It worked for the most part, but that he landed in an awkward heap three feet from where he had been standing, disoriented, left eye focused halfway across the graveyard, right searching the darkness in front of him. The sound of gunfire wasn't something he could pay attention to at the moment, not when his eyes finally settled on the things that, he realized, had bit him. And there were two of them.

The first was green-black and serpentine, upright despite the fact that it lacked proper legs, the humanoid face split by a too-wide snake mouth. The eyes, however, were perfectly normal, and ringed in dull black scales, as if that part of this person – this _human_ – had yet to fall victim of the power that plagued it. He watched it open its mouth, the slits of its nostrils flared, and the glimmer of yellowish fangs made him swallow thickly. Poison? He couldn't tell. It was too dark for him to see anything and his leg hurt too badly for him to pay attention to anything but standing up – he could hardly feel his foot at all.

He told himself that that was one of the reasons why it was so hard for him to tell what, exactly, the second of his attackers was. A rat, perhaps, with large round ears and long white whiskers, and a face that was too narrow and too long for its neck – the thought of it made Allen shiver.

"_Oh, Pierrot…"_ The voice was just beside his right ear, so close and yet he couldn't feel breath with it. He turned his gaze that way, and felt his heart clench in his chest when nothing was there. _"As fun as they are to look at, you really should pay more attention to yourself…"_

Allen glanced to the right to see _something_ pull taught around his wrist and yank him that way, lifting him from the ground before, to his surprise, changing his trajectory and lobbing him into the two creatures that had attacked him. He expected them to charge, to bite and scratch at him, for the snake to strike at a weak point and recoil to do it again. He did not expect a serpentine tail to strike him across the side his head and send him slamming into the nearest tombstone with a _crack_ that he didn't feel the repercussions of, too numbed by adrenaline and fear. After a short delay, pain shot from the base of his neck to the bone above his right eye and everything _tilted_ sickly around itself, blurry, shifting. There was blood in his mouth that made him cough, spreading warm and sticky on his lips.

He tried to push himself up, but something smashed hard against his chest, three times, each one driving the air from his lungs. It didn't matter if he had Crown Clown – he couldn't breathe when the pounding was finished. He felt as if his ribcage was suddenly too small for the billows of his lungs.

There was movement that he couldn't follow, and kind, laughing dark eyes looking down at him, then pain cutting onto the sides of his throat. He couldn't breathe and he didn't know where his arms were, couldn't see out of his right eye, he couldn't scream. His lungs burned with effort. He felt sick, like the blackness that had already consumed most of his vision would be a pleasant reprieve from this horrible nightmare, so he didn't think much about how he could focus on those eyes, glimmering with moonlight, still laughing at him. They were just eyes, tender eyes, watching him fall asleep.

"_Try not to die, little Pierrot,"_ The shadow spoke to him as that gaze came closer, dancing with delight. _"Not before I know what you might become."_

-- -- --

Running down the hill, for some reason, had made his chest ache, but it wasn't from exertion – a distance that short wouldn't have worn him out even if he had needed to breathe – but rather more like a bruise, throbbing with every step. Kanda shrugged it off as his imagination when the pain did not worsen and hurried on, scanning the dark graveyard with eyes that saw it as well as he would in broad daylight.

It was that sight that had helped him save Lavi.

The idiot had just been sitting there, looking up at what was obviously their prey, waiting for death. The samurai saw more things wrong with that than he cared to name. What did it matter if the thing the Akuma killed was a human – Kanda had done the same before – that wasn't the problem. The problem was dying, according to Kanda.

The gun Mörder held against Mugen's edge refused to slice into pieces like the Japanese man had hoped it might, but then again he hadn't hit it at the preferred angle to begin with. The horizontal stinging, bleeding gash across mid-chest was proof of that.

The Akuma in question shifted, changing its weight until it was held by its back foot, which allowed Kanda to rock back and lurch forward again, bringing his sword down across the barrel of the gun with more force than before; a short shower of sparks sprinkled toward his feet, bright to his night-adjusted eyes. He didn't particularly care. He didn't need to be able to see to grit his teeth and push forward, angling his blade for Mörder's wrist with his next strike. The Akuma was grinning at him when it shoved back, left shoulder shifted low. Its countenance, once ruggedly handsome, had stretched into something like a rubber travesty of a mask, the line of his scar peeling away from the metal off his face.

A second shower of sparks made Kanda wince, as his blade was deflected and blocked again, locking them once more with the barrel of Mörder's gun across Mugen's blade.

"Yuu-chan!" His name – if that _qualified_ as his name – didn't distract him from what he was aiming to do, but the press of something to his stomach did. The gun he held Mugen against was supported by but one hand, the other, to his slight shock, was pressed to his gut, fingers wrapped around the butt of a second weapon.

Kanda had seen that when the Akuma had come to kill Lavi the first time, the second silver pistol. The flash of sparks had blinded him while it was drawn.

There was only time enough to move a half step to the left before the gun fired.

It hit him slightly above his hip bone, toward the middle of his stomach, first with _pressure_ rather than _pain_ like any bullet of that caliber would have. Ignoring the burn of the virus in his flesh, Kanda lurched awkwardly forward and slashed down at the Akuma's right shoulder, burying his katana with enough force to push the machine away, both of them staggering. Blood sprayed out from the wound and the Akuma pushed it self away, growling at the pain in its shoulder.

The ground beneath them began to glow softly red.

The samurai recognized the symbol at once and retreated slightly, three steps before the pain got the better of him and he let his left hand cup the wound on his stomach, the better to hinder blood loss. Mörder didn't seem to notice the fire symbol smoldering beneath his feet, and pointed both of his weapons at Kanda, a strange look on his face. The Akuma didn't understand why it was that the Exorcist didn't crumble. The wave of fire that swept upward was enough to bring a startled cry of agony from the creature's lips, a sound that was neither human nor machine, but rather a twisted combination of both. Kanda saw a chance and took it. Hurriedly he dashed behind one of the taller headstones, just out of sight – the best place he could see to take a short sojourn and find out just how badly he was wounded.

Within moments, as the smoke and flame dissipated across the sky, there was a warm hand pressed to his shoulder, a hand that he knew had blood in it, which _smelled_ like Lavi. He cast his eyes to it and followed the length of the redhead's arm first to his shoulder and then to his face, noting a short gash on his left cheek, a growing bruise on his chin, as well as a less bloody blot where the gauze was missing from the apprentice Bookman's temple. His eye was wide and focused, not fogged with emotion like it had been.

"You ok?" The question caught Kanda a little off guard, especially how very quiet it was. There were fingers on the back of his hand, pressed to the place he had been shot.

Wordlessly the samurai nodded. "Don't be stupid, something like this won't kill me." As if to negate the words he winced, hissing from behind his teeth. Unpleasant fire spread up his chest and down his right leg, it would be difficult to move before his body recovered from the virus seeping through his system and he cursed it, lifting his hand to examine it. There was more blood than he was comfortable looking at – it disgusted him slightly that looking at it made him want to _lick_ his fingers – and the telltale points of pentagrams on what skin he could see, burning black against his pallid flesh. _That_ hurt, no matter how he didn't want to admit it.

"Um… Yuu-chan… didn't that bullet have—"

"Shut up."

"But the owl-bird-girl-thing turned to ash and I don't want you to die without—"

"_Shut. Up."_ Kanda growled at Lavi, narrowing his eyes at the redhead. He didn't need to be found like this, no matter what the idiot wanted to talk to him about, and it wasn't like he was dying anyway, not yet. There was a glint of pain in the other Exorcist's face so he did the only thing he could think to: he took the apprentice Bookman by his high collar and kissed him, which was the best apology he could manage at the moment.

Lavi smiled crookedly when he pushed away just as suddenly as he had been pulled down, head cocked to the side. "Then you'll be ok?"

"Che." Kanda craned his neck against the stone at his back in an effort to see what the Akuma formerly known as Mörder was doing, but couldn't lift himself far enough without putting strain on his stomach. With a huff he settled back down again, resisting the urge to rush the healing process more than it already was. "Where's Moyashi?"

"I lost sight of him about thirty seconds ago, still on the hill, fighting two things like us. He crashed into something and then I had to focus on the fire seal." Lavi glanced over the top of their rather pathetic cover, gripping his hammer to his chest. "The zombies look like they're leaving… though… a lot of them are in pieces... Jesus…" He trailed off, and turned his eye in a sweep across the churchyard. "I don't think we have to worry as long as those townspeople-turned-monsters attack the zombies for us." Lavi looked down at Kanda again, frowning, and laid his hand once more on top of the older man's, cold, sticky blood oozing through his fingers. "Really, you'll be ok, right? You can get up if I make you mad enough?"

Kanda ignored the question and narrowed his eyes at the younger man. "Where's the Akuma?"

"Systematically searching graves, moving in the wrong direction."

"Good." With a groan, Kanda pushed himself to sitting, though much of his weight still rested on the stone behind him. It was cooler than he was, which reassured him to some degree. Pulling both his own and Lavi's hand from his stomach, he saw that though the virus had begun to fade – and with it the pain it caused in that area – the wound itself was still exactly as it had been, bleeding freely, the blood that had congealed coming up with his fingers. A bandage would have been nice – not that they had any. They had snuck out without a Finder to carry them. _"Kuso…"_ He muttered, and put his hand down again, squelching against his jacket.

Lavi lowered himself enough to hook an arm under the samurai's shoulders and pull him farther upward, relinquishing his hold on Kanda's hand for the sake of holding his Innocence. "If I get us up, can you run?"

"Che." Kanda responded with a slight bend to his knees, enough to show that he was prepared to try. "If you'd _wait_ two minutes I could push myself up, asshole."

Lavi smirked down at the Japanese man before pausing, left eyebrow cocked high above the right in something of a one-eyed wink, almost flirty. "C'mon, will two minutes really make that much of a difference for you? In that two minutes he might realize that we both hid _this_ way and not over _there_. I say we make for the hill, dash our way up to Al—"

A loud, shrieking scream pulled the redhead's ears down and he turned, Kanda matching the movement. They both caught sight of a person the likes of which they had never seen – green and scaled and footless, though obviously standing – holding in its right hand the limp, bloody body of Allen Walker, his eyes open but unfocused, Innocence no longer active. Lavi tensed at it, anger burning in his gut, but remained where he was, fingers squeezing more tightly on Kanda's coat. The snake-creature held the boy out by the back of his jacket but Allen remained impassive, and the red shine of blood down his chest showed where the gore came from, as well as the rapid, forced rise and fall of his ribcage.

"_If you want him,"_ The voice didn't sound at all like it came from the snake-person, but rather somewhere else on the hill, slightly more toward Allen. _"Come and get him!"_ The creature holding Allen's coat flopped him over a shoulder and started off down the hill toward the place that had initially filled Lavi with the urge to kill something – moving at a pace that seemed rather ridiculous for a serpent to move at. The redhead watched, aware that Kanda was watching with him.

"I'll finish Mörder, you follow Allen?" The apprentice Bookman asked, looking down at the recovering samurai. The wound was still bleeding, though not as badly as it had been before.

"Che. If that thing could take Moyashi, both of us will have to fight it. You might be borderline useless but that's a least something." Kanda took a handful of Lavi's coat in his left hand, smearing his blood on it – the smell made his heart pound – while he renewed his grip on his katana in his right hand, stabbing the blade into the dirt. "Kill the Akuma, get the Innocence, then Moyashi. What is he level two?"

"No idea, he's still wearing rugged-German-gunslinger skin."

Kanda grumbled. If Allen had gone down the hill and Lavi had stayed like suggested, Mörder would have been dead on sight. Not that it mattered now. Shaking the snow from his wet bangs, the Japanese man nodded and Lavi lifted, working him up onto wobbly, uncertain feet. It usually didn't take this long for such a wound to become little more than an annoyance but the samurai didn't let that bother him at the moment, not with more important things in mind. "I'll get its attention, you fry it, understand?"

Lavi nodded and relinquished his hold on his lover's back so he could stand alone, leaning on the pommel of his sword. "If you think that's best, ok. Let's make this fast, the more blood you lose, the redder your eyes get, and I don't think I want to see you full of bloodlust on a battlefield, ya know?"

"I'll be _fine_." Kanda insisted, an echo of what he had said when he had first started to change the way he had. His sword made a wet sound of suction as he pulled it from the ground, the black blade shimmering to life as he turned and ran his fingers down the length of it. He met Lavi's gaze with his eyes narrowed, not quite glaring. _"Shinanaide."_ He almost commanded, and his left hand smeared his own blood on the curve of Lavi's hip. The confused expression the apprentice Bookman gave him almost made him smile, "It means _don't die._"

"I won't. I promise." Lavi chimed, and seemed to think for a moment about kissing the samurai in front of him until the thought better of it, amusement flashing behind his eye. He didn't speak a farewell, or wave a hand, he just turned away, dashing from shadow to shadow, hammer held tightly in both of his hands, larger than even a moment before.

Kanda gave the graveyard a long, glaring sweep of his eyes, and felt his lips turn down when he caught sight of the machine in question. The thing was still human looking, unhurt, and still searching in the wrong direction. If the Japanese man had been of sounder physical ability at the moment, he would have charged the bleeding akuma – instead he lifted his sword with both hands, sighting down the length of it, aiming for Mörder's back. Kanda wasn't usually one to attack from afar – it took more concentration to _guide _Hell's Insects than he was willing to subtract from his swordsmanship – but now was the time to make an exception, being running didn't seem like that splendid of an idea. He spoke the words under his breath, hardly more than a whisper, and slashed downward, that same warm, buzzing, _power_ zinging across his chest with the motion.

It wasn't silent, but Kanda ignored what he was hearing for the sake of willing his five projectiles at Mörder's back. They would have gone after his target on their own to some extent, but there was always the chance that a sudden, fast moving zombie or a well aimed bullet would distract them from what he intended – that couldn't happen now. As Mörder, his face scrunched and his metallic teeth showing from behind what remained of his lips, turned and opened fire, the ground beneath his feet began to glow softly red again, and then white on top of that, the light catching in his suddenly black eyes.

Kanda felt a bullet graze his right arm but held it firm, focused on willing two insects to either side of the machine and one above, the better to keep the Akuma from noticing the building power beneath his feet.

His ribs still hurt for some reason, as did his stomach, but there was no time for that, no time to think about the pain in his arm. He focused his Innocence, his mind, on what needed to be done. Mörder was charging him but that didn't matter either – nothing mattered but the goal.

The Akuma made a loud laughing sound, hysterical, as his feet pumped against the muddy ground, snow plastering to his hair and hat. He lifted his left gun in front of him and took aim, words that Kanda could hardly distinguish falling from his lips as he moved. "And to think I let you live that day, Exorcist! That I helped you! At least you lead me to it! Right to what I wanted!" Three insects fell – the last two didn't have much of a chance but it didn't matter, the sky suddenly cracked open like a great gray and black eggshell, rent with a bolt of lightening from above and a swirl of flame from below, loud and bright and roaring. The combination of elements caught the gunman's right foot as soon as it was formed, but the Akuma did not cry out at it – he leaned heavily on his remaining limb and took aim once more.

Kanda let the illusion fade. It was pointless. The three gunshots that sounded in front of him – those he needed to pay attention to.

Lavi, standing behind Mörder's current position, having flanked him, raised his hammer in the air and commanded it larger, all the while his left eye guided a path for the serpent of flame and lightening he had made. Moments like this, when he compared the raw forces of nature that he summoned and the creatures of the underworld that Mugen produced, he had to wonder if Yuu had the higher synch rate or not. It was a stupid question, really, and he knew it. No matter how big and violent his own attacks were, the second illusion annihilated anything Lavi could produce without unlocking his own abilities. That, however, was a thought for later contemplation – now was the time for action. For that reason he brought the giant hammer forward, catching the tunnel of cracking thunder and searing flame on the weapon's head and slamming it into where he hoped Mörder would be standing. His whole shoulder protested – the lightness of the weapon did not change the fact that he had just smashed it full force into the ground – and he realized he had unleashed a guttural battle cry, though what purpose it served he couldn't imagine. As the sound faded from his lips he blasted the earth a final time, gritting his teeth to the feeling of so much power being used at once.

There was a shriek and a sound like a groan, a loud _bang_ and the softer _thump_ of something lighter than the hammer striking the ground. As the power faded from his Innocence a thunderclap made the entire graveyard shudder for an instant, the dying flames sizzled against the snow and died away, leaving a low layer of badly scented steam in their wake, like ozone and metal and grass. Lavi allowed his weapon to shrink enough to be leaned on, panting heavily, feeling every bruise and cut on his body with a freshness that made him grimace. The snow was growing thicker, but the flakes that had landed on his heated skin had melted into a dangerous layer of water on his flesh, already freezing in the winter wind.

Still, he took the time to scan the snow in front of him, searching the white and red-brown ground for footprints or marks of escape, bullet marks or pentacles. He saw nothing but the seven meter wide circle he had charred into the ground and in front of it, another of equal proportions, a searing mound of akuma parts lumped in the middle of it. Mörder's hat had smoldered with the rest of him.

With a loud inward breath and a cough, Lavi started forward, picking his way quietly and quickly around the rubble, aware that any grave might mark the resting place of a once-living corpse, still glancing forward every so often. He didn't want to trip on a body. A rather odd looking lump in the snow caught his eye ahead and he snuck toward it, moving hurriedly, until the scent of blood filled his nostrils – fresh blood.

"Yuu!" The samurai was more or less sitting on his feet, snow in his hair and down both of his arms, not melting as fast as it landed, piling up on his eyelashes. The redhead forgot about the zombies and the dead akuma, let Allen slip out of his mind for a moment, and came to a skidding, knee bashing halt in front of the Japanese man, left hand reaching for his face. The pair of eyes that opened to him was a color between black and red, leaning more toward the latter, focused on his face. Relief rushed through his chest as he touched his lover's face, leaning toward him. Kanda leaned back at the same pace until Lavi found himself looking down at the dark haired man, looking at his tired, hungry features, water dripping from the tips of his ears and his nose. "You ok?" He whispered, and the air that escaped his mouth billowed in a white fog between them. Kanda's left hand, caked in dried blood, but otherwise steady, felt like ice on the side of Lavi's face.

"Losing blood makes me tired."

"Then we should get this over with so you can sleep."

"Do you think…" Kanda paused, pulling the redhead a little closer. Lavi knew what he wanted but waited for it, waited for the press of lips at the juncture of his throat. "I could take a little?"

The apprentice Bookman nodded and tried to ignore the cold nose pressed to his skin. "You've lost a lot, so yeah. How's the wound? _Ow._ Be nice, I'm not a steak." He realized after a moment that the Japanese man had sunk his teeth into an old wound, most likely to avoid littering his neck with bite marks, but it made it hurt a bit more – the skin was already bruised and sensitive. Kanda however, was very gentle, allowing the blood to flow naturally rather than sucking it out. Lavi made a mental note to thank him.

Instead he let his left hand, nearly numb with cold, wander down the samurai's chest until he found the wound that, to his surprise, still oozed slowly, darkly colored blood, soaking a good portion of Kanda's coat. Lavi had to wonder just how much the Japanese man could lose before he stopped thinking and just drank for survival – but shook the thought from his mind. He wasn't going to lose that much blood from a gunshot, not if he hadn't already.

Steadily, Lavi undid the buttons of his jacket so he could get to the shirt underneath and, with a grimace, tear what had to be strongest fabric Komui had ever made into comfortable clothes into an uneven, clumsy looking strip. Kanda ignored him as Lavi captured the older man's left hand and reached into his jacket sleeve, then pinched the top of his button down shirt, just bellow the seam, and gave a tug that disconnected it from the torso of the garment in a single pull. Kanda made a little curious sound but Lavi didn't answer, too intent on taking the destroyed garment and fashioning it into something like a bandage. He couldn't watch while he worked, not with Kanda drinking, but he managed without too much trouble to undo the buttons of his lover's jacket and place the waded shirtsleeve in the correct place. For a time he only held it, waiting for Kanda to pull away.

As he withdrew, Lavi secured the mass of cloth with the waist of his shirt – which left his own belly button exposed for the moment. Kanda winced when the makeshift dressing was knotted into place, but didn't complain, and instead laid his head back in the snow, looking up at the redhead. "Ready?" Kanda questioned, and the apprentice Bookman shivered, suffering from mild blood loss and cold.

"Just one thing," Lavi said quietly, and leaned down to kiss the samurai firmly on the lips, fearlessly, almost desperately. It wasn't a long kiss, but the heat it caused stilled his shivering momentarily and lifted the right side of Kanda's mouth in a slightly amused expression, which made the kiss slightly more awkward than it could have been. Pulling away, Lavi returned the expression, the snowy front of his hair falling over his eye patch in a red-crystal and white-powder wave. For a moment he seemed very boyish, almost triumphant, and Kanda had to wonder if the apprentice Bookman had sorted through his feelings and found that _love_ was what he felt even if he didn't understand it, though he doubted he would hear the words even if the younger man knew. "Let's go save Allen-chan."

-- -- --

Everything was liquid oozing around itself, tangled and dark, and very, very cold. Allen could hardly breathe the air was so chilled in his lungs, cutting him open like shards of glass, stinging, numbing the fingers of his right hand. With a groan he swallowed – his mouth tasted salty and coppery – before rolling his head to the side in an effort to see through the twisted world his left eye was showing him, black and white and far away feeling, not even the barest evidence of an akuma soul in sight. Everything hurt and span – and bringing the fingers of his right hand to his unseeing eye made him retch with pain, blurring what little he could make out with his left. His chest convulsed and he grew still again. Broken ribs, concussion, and only God knew what else – he couldn't move to check. The rushed quality to his breath warned him that there had to be more.

"Don't try to move, you'll hurt yourself." The voice was familiar but he couldn't place where, like something he had heard in a very distant dream. Something laid itself across his face, blocking his eyesight, and something else pressed to his throat – that reeked of alcohol and burned like fire, but worse. He winced at it, but found his voice unable to protest for any number of reasons. "Without that cape of silver, you're just a boy with an ugly left hand and a scar, aren't you? But the uniforms… are you the next thing up from that hunter with the bloody painful bullets? Fucking pointless if you are. I haven't slept well in two months from this thing, I doubt I'll die either." There were hands on the British boy's chest, pushing back his jacket, and a low, deep whistled sounded over his face.

"If I didn't know better, I'd think you were buggered. Don't think I'll get a word out of you with a crushed sternum and two cracked clavicles – at least not without drugs or whiskey. What do you say you give gabbing a shot, hm?" The voice came very close to his ear, speaking very clearly, though he couldn't remember where he had heard it. "What are you, boy? A twelve year old assassin?"

Allen opened his mouth, which still tasted of blood, and prayed that this person was the one they were looking for, because otherwise he was very, very dead. His breath came out in an agonizing line, pushed through his teeth, words forming only on his lips, pain searing in his lungs with every alcohol scented breath. "I'm an… Ex-exor…cist…" He whispered, hearing his breath catch in his throat. "W-we want…t-to… 'elp you." Finishing brought a finger to his lips, stopping him from going on anymore than he already had.

"An Exorcist, huh?" The voice chuckled. "I don't need an exorcism, boy. I've already embraced my demons."

-- -- --

"Yuu?"

"What?"

"You're kinda… sagging."

"Sagging?"

"Drooping."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" The samurai and the apprentice Bookman had wandered more or less silently from one end of the now empty graveyard to the other, tripping over immobile zombie corpses, Kanda stumbling more often than he was comfortable with. He half understood what it was that Lavi meant as soon as he asked – his shoulders were slightly hunched, mostly in the effort to press on the wound on his torso, which still hurt, even if it wasn't pouring blood down his jacket anymore. The sleeve against his skin was soaked. It was rare for Kanda to bleed so much – even when it hadn't been that long since his last injury – and it made him wonder why exactly that was.

There were still quite a few petals left, he knew. Enough to last hundreds of gunshot wounds like this one.

And yet the ribs he had broken days ago were hurting more with every step and the pain in his stomach was not declining. Something was wrong.

Lavi's right hand touched him lightly on the shoulder, and it felt very large and heavy against his frame. He was tired. "You look like it hurts to walk, Yuu-chan." The redhead clarified, a serious frown on his face. "In fact, you're walking like your ribs are bothering you… you gonna be ok? And be honest, I don't want any of this _'fine'_ crap you keep pulling." His voice, though low, carried with it the warning that no matter what or who they were going to save, if Kanda answered with that same, idiotic claim again, they would be stopping to have an inspection of his health. The Japanese man drew in an unneeded breath and sighed, letting his obvious exasperation show.

"I must have hurt them and didn't notice. I'll live."

"You're pretty light. I can carry you."

"Che." Kanda narrowed his eyes at the idiot beside him. "And defend yourself _how_, exactly?"

"Well, you'd have… wait… _that's_ your protest? Shouldn't you say something about how you don't want to be weak in front of me?"

The samurai didn't look away, nor did his expression change. He simply brushed Lavi's hand from his shoulder as he spoke. "Your safety takes priority over my weakness," Kanda said flatly, then turned his face back to the churchyard as if he had caught something interesting out of the corner of his eye – at the base of the cliff, tucked away under the shadows. He lifted Mugen, still active in his right hand, and pointed at a mausoleum that had been half carved out of the cliff side and half built of large, gray stone that seemed to be what made up most of the surrounding rock. "That smells like blood." He observed plainly, and vaguely saw Lavi nod from beside him.

"How we gonna do this? Go in with guns blazing and demand our Moyashi-chan back, beat the thing into submission, and then tell it our intentions?" Lavi inquired, and lifted his abandoned hand to scratch at the space between his ears.

"Yeah, because _that_ will work so well. After we're both dead, you can come back and explain things to the asshole that killed us and take it back to the Order. Do you even _have_ a brain, or do you just pretend most of the time?"

"What do you mean _most _of the time?"

"I mean shut up before you hurt yourself, _baka_." It had been a very long time since they had argued like this, and Kanda had to wonder if the flirtatious smile on Lavi's lips meant that this wasn't arguing at all. He didn't mind if it wasn't.

"You know, _baka_ and _Lavi_ have the same number of syllables." The redhead pointed out with a pout.

"I wonder if Bookman realized and named you that on purpose to make them interchangeable."

"_I_ named me, thanks. And they aren't interchangeable, but _Lavi_ is just as much work as _baka, _so say _Lavi._"

"Shut up, we're nearly in earshot."

"Oh, c'mon Yuu-chan…"

"Che. _Yuu-chan_ is harder to say than _Kanda_, so why don't you use _Kanda_ instead?"

"Because I love you," Lavi said offhandedly, voice perfectly steady, eye focused on the terrain ahead. He took three more steps before he slowed and eventually stopped, his face drained of color, gaze no longer seeing. He quickly, with his heart thumping in his chest, reviewed the conversation in his mind three times over, listening to the last thing he had said and searching it for sincerity, for lies, for any hint of something besides truth – and then he looked up at Kanda, blinking. The samurai looked exactly the same as he had a moment ago, worn out, but a crooked little grin creased his lips, allowing a single vampire fang to gleam in the moon's light. Lavi wavered. He opened his mouth and slowly took in a breath before sighing and starting anew, heart slamming like a hammer on an anvil against his ribcage. "Ne, Yuu… did I just say… that I… I mean… did I…"

Kanda's broken smile never faltered. "Che."

Lavi's already pale face became even paler, his eye rounded and his lips turned down in protest. It didn't matter what he said now – the words were out in the air, and now in his mind, wearing that little shred of separation that still hardly remained. "That kinda just fell out…" The redhead whispered, "I… can I sorta… unsay it and keep it for later? When I'm not—"

"No." Kanda said at once, cutting him off with a glare. "You love me, the end. You don't get a redo."

"But… Kand—"

"Don't you _ever _call me _Kanda_!" The words were dangerously loud, but the Japanese Exorcist didn't seem to care as he stomped back to the apprentice Bookman and took him by the collar of his jacket, yanking him forward with a scowl pulling down at his lips. The redhead touched Kanda's shoulders in an attempt to keep a bit of his own weight on his feet but failed no small amount when his heels lifted and he stepped into the older man, tripped a bit by his boot. The moment he made to protest there were lips on his own, hard enough that he could feel the press of teeth behind them, and a hand in his hair, stopping his retreat, not that he would have wanted to. The caress was nearly desperate, the tongue against his own worked no longer to dominate but rather to mingle, and his own hands drifted slowly, shakily around his lover's back.

Honesty, trust, desire, passion – it all made sense then. All because of the little thing called _love_.

Parting didn't make his arms let go, nor did it assuage the sudden reality of the moment – he kept the smaller man against him and closed his eye, shaking slightly, and thought about the older man's request. There were too many emotions in the moment for him to focus on repressing any one of them, so Lavi didn't. He simply held on.

Mostly he was _happy_, he decided. _Happy_ and _loved._

Kanda's voice was much softer against the side of his face, his embrace looser. "I told you that you were stupid."

Lavi heard himself chuckle and sniffed, but he couldn't remember crying, couldn't remember starting to. It didn't matter – he was _happy_ that he was. "Why didn't you tell me…Yuu-chan? If you knew, why didn't you say anything?" To his surprise the samurai didn't answer at once and simply stood there, searching for words. But Lavi could wait. It didn't matter if the Japanese man needed to explain that to him in a few years because he didn't know how to word it, he could wait.

"I wanted you to figure it out." Kanda said quietly, and he leaned a bit more surely, letting Lavi support him. The apprentice Bookman held him, and even smiled a little at the display. "And I didn't know how to say it. Telling you that you love me… explaining to you that the reason you _care_—I can't do it. There aren't words to convince someone of something like that, so I decided to just wait for you to figure it out, even if I hate waiting. When we… made… love that night… what you said…" The samurai paused and his Adam's apple bobbed against Lavi's shoulder as if it was a battle to swallow. "I'd have waited forever after I heard that."

"Yuu…"

"Shit."

Lavi's right hand cupped the back of the Japanese man's head and pulled him closer, nuzzling into the side of his neck with a motion that was half-catlike and half-needy, a low moan in the back of his throat. "I love you," he repeated against Kanda's skin, as if trying out the words. "I love you. Yuu… fuck, no wonder you can get up in the morning!" He almost laughed but stopped halfway, feeling the samurai melt against him like the snow between their chests, slowly, until it seemed Lavi wouldn't be able to pull himself away without taking a part of his lover with him. "When we get back – God, I want to… but we shouldn't be doing this here… Allen is—"

"Another minute won't kill him," Kanda growled, though it was obvious he wasn't as sure in that statement as he would have liked to have been. "He is _not_ allowed to interrupt this. I refuse."

"Tim is behind you."

"Maybe I'm an exhibitionist."

"You almost had an anxiety attack when I was talking even a little dirty in the alley, you are _not_ an exhibitionist."

"Che."

Lavi pulled away enough to find himself lightly kissed, just a brush of lips against his, hardly of note, but still something between them. He smiled at it. Now, for some reason, he didn't mind the warmth of emotion that welled in his chest at the touch. He relished it. The little dance of heat in his chest bone, the too wide smile that threatened to split his face – it was all purposeful and _good._ "Let's get this done with, ok?" He suggested, and held very, very still when Kanda leaned slightly upward and pressed their foreheads together in an echo of what had happened two nights before, sticking his bangs to his face. Lavi closed his eye to it and sighed, aware that the action spread heated air across the bridge of Kanda's nose before he kissed the icy end of it, very softly. The same, imperfect grin took the older man's lips.

"Yeah…" Kanda mumbled up at him. "Let's."

-- -- --

**This ended on a slightly different note than intended – Lavi wasn't supposed to figure things out this chapter – but I still like it. It was more **_**Lavi**_** than what I had planned in the future. It still works out, it'll end how I want it to, but this part is different.**

**You can partly blame Dark-chan, if you feel like you must blame someone. I asked her if it was ok and if I should go for it regardless of my plans and she said, "YUS!" with a big hearty face. So it's not my fault. 8D**

**Thanks for reading and reviewing! TFL is over half done, you will see it soon, I promise…ish…**


	21. Rejection and Affection

**Remember how I said last chapter was short? Guess what?**

**OMFG, it's an epic. Only… not a poem.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own any of the canon DGM characters.**

**Warnings: Blood/gore, shounen-ai, a random OC who won't be important unless you like the non-romantic plot, DIALOGUE HEAVY SECTIONS. Etc.**

**-- -- --**

Part Twenty: Rejection and Affection

The snow stopped during their walk across the graveyard, which cast their destination in the harsh silver light of the moon, cutting it out of the shadows like a razor. The mausoleum had been built a very long time ago it seemed, longer than any of the three Exorcists could have possibly known at a glance. The walls were gray granite, the roof slate shingles, and the door imported mahogany of the highest quality, but the name plate next to the door had worn until it was unreadable. It was hard, however, for Lavi to take in those details, to focus on the duty that Kanda was so ready to perform, without thinking about what might happen. If they opened that door and went inside for Allen, there was no guarantee that they would all come out again alive.

He had always known that. And yet, as they mounted the steps, his Innocence clenched in his right hand, Kanda a step behind him, he felt that his fear ran deeper than it ever had before.

Because of that he kissed the samurai just outside of the door. Kanda glared at him – this wasn't the time or the place for such things – but Lavi only smiled back. Some things were more important to do at the wrong time than to never do at all.

Entering made the hinges shriek with rust, and the cold doorknob didn't turn back automatically when Lavi let it go. Not that it mattered. That meant they wouldn't be locked in, at least, which he found mildly reassuring. A flurry of anticipation filled his chest in a feeling that wasn't quite nervousness and wasn't quite excitement, and it went farther than he remembered, speeding his pulse in a way he wasn't entirely sure he was used to. It was real. Everything was real. The stone steps that lead down from their current position, the three tombs on either side of the lower room, the single sputtering sconce over his head – it all had a sort of rough texture that he didn't remember. The same sort of harsh truth that came with touches so intimate they left him feeling naked despite his clothes.

As his feet moved down the stairs, heavy on the old stones, grinding dirt, he focused on _not_ thinking about Yuu. It was hard not to. _So_ hard. More than anything he wanted the mission over and both of them rested so he could just touch the Japanese man naked again, it didn't even matter how or when or where – he just _wanted_ to. Wanted to give that same kind of emotion that Kanda had given him and know exactly what was meant by it as soon as he could. It would be different, he knew, and he would feel shy, but that didn't matter. Not when he thought about how close they would be.

He shook his head. Trying not to think about it just made him think about it more, and he knew that his lover would kick his ass if he knew.

Obligation before gratification, and all.

The very back of the main room was cast in one large, deep shadow that, Lavi slowly realized, blocked a medium sized tunnel from sight. The structure wasn't quite circular, roughly hewn from the stone as if by someone using little more than a small hammer or a large rock, sharp at the edges. Two inches of water had gathered at the bottom of it, though where the liquid came from, Lavi could only guess without looking through the hole.

As he knelt to inspect further, Kanda took up a defensive stance behind him, hovering like a protective mother hen. There was a growl in the samurai's throat, low and foreboding that Lavi ignored for the moment, as he looked out into what seemed to be a large, natural cave, drenched in moonlight. That was wrong. A cave in a mausoleum lit by the moon was illogical. Lavi moved gradually forward, hunching through the passageway, and let his gaze rove over the entirety of the space, trying to decide if he was somehow imagining the things in front of him.

The place was roughly bowl-shaped, washed in black and white from the silver shining through the lack of a roof. It might have been a stone building once, a jail or the dungeon to some long destroyed estate, weathered with wind and rain and sun. What remained of the ceiling consisted mostly of long rotted wooden planks and teetering blocks of stone by the walls, ruined and waiting to fall. The walls were mud-smeared and uneven, water ran down the one to his left in a little natural groove, pooling in the middle of the floor without touching the slightly warped and upraised edges to his right. Lavi looked toward the far end of the slightly less that square room and there, just out of the light, was a large red button sitting in a puddle of blood.

"Shit!"

Kanda ducked into the passage behind Lavi at the word, and came through in time to watch the redhead splash through the puddle in the middle of the room and kneel halfway in the starlight, hammer returned to its holster. He opened his mouth to voice a warning and tasted blood on the air, thick and heavy and _delicious_, and rocked his back against the stone in an effort to ignore that feeling altogether. Mugen rattled in his hand until he forced his arm to stillness. Breathing wasn't good. He could smell and taste what was on the air when he took it in, so he stopped for the moment, eyes flicking through the shadows in the hope of finding something upon which to focus his mind besides that _scent._

"Oh, fuck. Yuu!" Lavi sounded distinctly worried, with another, more dangerous emotion edging into his voice. "Can you give me a hand? I can't see color so I can't tell what's mud and what's blood and—"

"_No,"_ Kanda almost rasped the word, trying not to take in air to say it. "I can't even breathe in here… if I get closer, I'll…"

"Shit…"

"What is it?"

"Allen." The redhead responded simply, and his shoulders moved back and then forward as he leaned down, doing something Kanda found himself unwilling to focus on with his hands. Lavi made a soft, catlike purr in the back of his throat and his ears went down before his hands, glistening red with blood, lifted to the light. "I… want to… it's _Allen's_ blood… I should… take care of Allen. Yuu… I think I might be going crazy." He looked back at the samurai without rising and moved his left hand closer to his face. "I _want _to eat—"

"_L-Lavi?"_

"Oh my God, Allen!" The utterance of the redhead's name, so very softly that Kanda almost didn't hear it, broke whatever spell had settled over Lavi and made him turn back, concern the only emotion in his voice. Kanda let himself shift more steadily against the wall and forced his eyes to wander, to study the room, to _hunt_ from something that wasn't Allen or Lavi or _human._ He was only vaguely aware of a conversation going on between the apprentice Bookman and the white haired Exorcist, which consisted mostly of promises of safety and little questions about where they were and what had happened. The kid was tough, Kanda would give him that. Allen could hardly form sentences with any volume and yet he wanted to know how the mission was progressing.

And then something caught his eye.

On Lavi's blind side, tucked into the farthest corner, was a shadow that, he thought, had no logical purpose in being there.

"Baka Koneko, blind side, corner!" Mugen, which had always been at the ready, jerked in his hands as he brought it before him, keeping his eyes exactly on that shadow. It had gotten away before, it was true, but not this time, not when he knew how it moved and what it could do. He took a step forward and Lavi stood, hammer in hand in a fraction of a second, but he didn't move away from Allen. That was fine with Kanda. Let the redhead stay out of harms way for the moment, if the shadow tried to kill somebody, his odds of recovery were much lower than Kanda's.

The shadow did not react to being discovered. Kanda moved forward at a deliberate pace, sword in front of him, eyes locked on that dark black spot pooled low in the corner. His feet swished through the water in the middle of the room and he realized that he'd have to be next to Allen – bloody Allen – in order to get there. He gritted his teeth and moved forward, icy water soaking into his boots, glaring at that place as strongly as he dared.

He tried not to breathe.

"Yuu, maybe you should say something before it thinks we're here to kill it." Lavi warned from his left, shifting his weight back and forth. The samurai didn't look at him.

"Che. It already knows that. It got Allen '_Naïve and Self-Sacrificing'_ Walker for fuck's sake. It _knows_ we're here to find out if it's an accommodator."

"Accommodator?" The word came from somewhere in the room, but the voice that said it was not Allen's or Lavi's, though it shared a similar accent to the British boy's. Kanda did not take his eyes off of the shadow in the corner but he stopped walking, waiting to see what would happen to it now that it had spoken. "What exactly is that?"

Lavi steadied his feet and lowered his hammer, a bit more willing to show understanding and vulnerability to a stranger than Kanda was. The thump of his Innocence next to his feet almost made Kanda turn to see. Almost made the samurai yell at him for dropping his guard. "The three of us are accommodators. It means that we can use these weapons – which have Innocence in 'em – to destroy Akuma." He clarified as best as he could off of the top of his head, though he figured the explanation sounded just as crackpot and stupid as it would have been to say _'We're Gods disciples and you might be too!'_ like a general might have. He rattled on as quickly as he could, hoping the shadow would listen. "Akuma kill people. It's a lot more complicated than I can really explain without takin' about an hour to do it, and I'd like to know that you aren't gonna try and kills us, if that's at all possible."

Something brushed through the side of Lavi's hair and he stiffened, feeling a hand close around his own, thin and small and pale. It turned him around to face the entrance, and he was met with a person the likes of which he might have seen a thousand times since coming to the town. Dark, curling hair, deep dark eyes, skin as milky white as Allen's, a smooth, sloping and feminine jaw, generous lips – a _woman_ that only came to the middle of his chest. He couldn't move away from her, not for the life in him.

"Tell me about Akuma."

Lavi's response was incredulous, his eye shocked wide with surprise. _"You're_ the shadow?"

"No, I'm the Queen of England. Yes, I'm the bloody shadow, nitwit!"

Kanda turned at the voice and immediately regretted it, the sight of Allen – broken and bleeding through the bandages on his throat and chest – sent him staggering away in an effort not to move _forward_ and _bite_. Mugen clattered in his hand when his back hit the rock wall behind him, which was not far enough to remove him from the sight and smell before him, sticking in his mouth and nostrils. The blade flailed sideways and caught the moonlight, which reflected back at the shadow that shouldn't have been there to reveal a dark pile of cloth – a distraction. He cursed and forced his eyes to Lavi and, he was startled to discover, the tired looking woman standing in front of him.

_Stop it, you don't need blood. You aren't that hungry. You just drank—_

"They're machines," Lavi was explaining to her, hammer shrinking to a nonthreatening size in his right hand. She watched it from the corner of her gaze, almost curious. "Made out of metal and fueled with souls. We fought one out in the graveyard, you must have saw…"

"The blond man who shot me?" She tilted her head to the side and the curls of her bangs fell over her left eye, blocking it from sight. Genuine wonder filled her expression but Kanda could no longer watch the exchange, not without thinking about Allen's blood smearing Lavi's hands. He closed his eyes and left the redhead to it, devoting his mind to focusing on something – anything – besides what he wanted at the moment. Mugen's tip found the stone floor and he leaned on it, listening to their conversation without breath.

"He shot you?! Don't tell me you _are_ an accommodator and a parasitic-type on top of that."

"Do explain before I decide that I don't want to wait anymore and just kill you."

The redhead rambled, going about the explanation in a roundabout sort of way that would, Kanda decided, give the woman what she wanted in the end. It was enough. The Japanese man let himself sink against the wall silently, holding his sword in a two handed sort of block until the end lowered itself once more, almost as if his arm couldn't hold it anymore. The connection of the edge on stone was nearly soundless, but Lavi's left ears twitched in that direction anyway.

"…so the only way that I know of to survive an Akuma's bullets -- that I know of -- is to have Innocence inside of you, somewhere. Is there a chance that—" Lavi stopped when he heard the slight clatter of Mugen against stone and turned to look in Kanda's direction. The smaller man had his head tilted back on the wall behind him, one hand on his abdomen, the other curled loosely on his katana's hilt. The redhead felt his face drain of color and rocked on his feet, then glanced down at the woman he was trying to explain everything to. He didn't have time for her. "Gimme a sec."

Her eyes followed his gaze to the Japanese man and she frowned, an expression that made her small, square face seem somewhat rounded from his angle. She released him. "So assuming that I _do_ have this _Innocence_ on me," she shrugged as Lavi went slogging across the puddle in the middle of the room toward the samurai, "Is that the reason whoever I kiss turns into a creature from someone's nightmares? Well, except for you two. Who _are_ you, I might ask?"

Before Lavi could answer, Kanda lifted Mugen and pointed it at him, blood red eyes cracked at him blearily. "Stay back or I'll drink you dry." The Japanese man warned, sword bobbing dangerously in his hands. The apprentice Bookman ignored him.

"I'm Lavi and this is… Yuu. The little one is Allen." He said it without looking at the brunette, his eyes only for the dark haired man he knelt in front of. Delicately, he pushed the katana away by the flat of the blade and leaned forward, watching as Kanda tried to retreat into the wall away from him. "We're Exorcists, like I said. It would make sense that, if what you do has anything to do with Innocence, it can't effect us like it does other people because we're already synched with our own weapons." Lavi took the Japanese man by the back of his neck and yanked him forward, and sighed at the little sound Kanda made, the hands that fisted on his jacket. It was just blood. The apprentice Bookman didn't need that much of it.

"I'm Ursa Weaver," the woman responded, and took a small step toward him. "What are… you doing?"

"Yuu needs blood or he'll go crazy, I can see it on his face. C'mon, bite me."

Kanda's hand let go of Mugen and he grabbed the redhead, but did not bite into his throat. Instead he simply held firm, looking at the side of his lover's face with glassy eyes.

_I shouldn't. I shouldn't. I might—_

"Yuu-chan! Bite me, damn it! I'll knock you out if you try to kill me." That got the apprentice Bookman a little gasp that resulted in Kanda's mouth closing at once on his throat. The woman – who he kind of figured should _know_ what she had turned the samurai into – let out a little gasp of surprise at it and stepped back when the Japanese man's eyes met hers, burning crimson. "Good… that's it Yuu-chan, you just drink, it'll be fine…" Lavi reached up and stroked the back of his lover's hair only to find himself unceremoniously hefted by the front of his coat and turned into the wall, his back pressed against the stone, Kanda leaning into his neck and chest. A little sound of surprise escaped the redhead, but little else. He didn't care what angle was needed, he was still willing.

Ursa looked down at him with an expression that was quite sure, her delicate, feminine hands fluttered from inside of the long dark cloak she wore, exposing the pale column of her neck to the moonlight. At the base of her throat, where a necklace might have hung, was a large green-black gem, embedded in her skin. Lavi almost said something, but Kanda moaned softly, as if in protest, and it forced him to pause long enough for the woman to find her voice and speak.

"I… suppose it's a vampire because I kissed it, right?"

"From what you said I'd think so but… why're you goin' around kissin' people anyway?" Lavi questioned, stroking the length of Kanda's hair ever so slowly. The samurai didn't seem to notice. Ursa did. "Come to think of it, where's your army of animal people? You turned them, right? So—"

Ursa nodded, but didn't give any sort of direction as to where he might find them. "They're waiting for my orders. I can't control what they turn into or who I do it to, but they do as I say once it's happened." As she watched, tired brown eyes thoughtful, Kanda slid a hand up under Lavi's shirt and pulled his head away, panting heavily now that he had gasped just once. Lavi smiled at her. "It's a bit of a story, if you want to know why I started, and I don't think this… Allen boy will stay conscious through the telling. If you can pry the bloodsucker off of your neck long enough to—"

"Make her drop the invocation." It was the clearest thing that the samurai had said since the ordeal had began, and it made him shake to say it. His hand on Lavi's chest curled slightly, nails on skin. "She's… not synched enough… the – Innocence is not… reacting—" He fell silent, curling in on himself, and Lavi pulled the Japanese man's face up closer to his own, placing his hands on the sides of his face.

"What Yuu? What's the Innocence not doing?"

"It should happen to _her_. What's happening to us should happen to _her_." Kanda tried to clarify, tried to make himself understood, and yet Lavi continued to look at him like he was completely insane, bleeding from his throat. The samurai knew then what he needed to do – and what he _wanted_ to do. He wanted to gorge himself, to drink until there was nothing left, but he needed to avoid doing that at all costs, so he would do exactly as Lavi had said – with or without the Bookman's help.

Lavi made to reply, but Kanda's face stopped him. The fingernails on his chest bit into his skin and the Japanese man made a low, guttural sound before rocking back on his feet as if in preparation to strike. "Yuu-chan, if you come at me…"

"_Knock me out now."_

"Yuu-chan, I'm warning you…"

"Don't _fucking _warn me and just _do it_ already."

Ursa took a step forward even as Lavi raised his right hand.

"If I do this wrong you're going to stop feeling your face, feel dizzy, maybe vomit—"

"_Rabi—"_ There was so much pleading in Kanda's voice, so much fear, that Lavi shut his eye and let his right hand do what he had never seen, only read about. With two fingers he hit the mental nerve on the inside of Kanda's jaw, and prayed that it was a good idea. To his slight surprise the samurai took the blow loosely, without tightening his face or neck at all, and immediately slumped into him, no longer breathing. The redhead opened his eyes and looked down at his lover, at the face pressed against his chest, and then up at the woman who had watched the ordeal, her chocolate eyes as wide and confused as those of a child.

"He'll be ok. He's just sleeping." Lavi tried to reassure her, and forced himself to smile.

Ursa wavered on her feet for a moment, seeming to think about what she had just seen. "Oh?"

"Yeah. While he's out of it, you wanna tell me how this whole thing started?"

"I came here after my would-be mother in law died." She said quietly, "Michael and I came to get the necklace from his mother's grave that she had promised him. But… when we had the groundskeeper bring us to the grave that was hers, the top was muddy. But we dug it up anyway." Her hands fluttered about her collar for a moment before she went on. "Her corpse was missing, but her clothes were there and…" Her fingers went to the gem under her cloak and moved aside the fabric so he could see where it rested, below the hollow of her throat and yet well above her breasts. He didn't even _think_ about those breasts. "This. When Michael picked it up… the whole world feel apart.

"There were corpses crawling from the ground and this… flaxen haired man, who turned into something like a knight from medieval books when we started to run. And we ran. The groundskeeper was caught by the corpses. I led Michael here in the hope that we could barricade ourselves in and wait those… creatures out…" Lavi watched as Ursa began to lose herself in the memory, eyes blinking as if to avoid tears. "We found this room and came back here to hide. We thought we were going to die. He held the necklace between us and… we kissed each other. I wished with all of my heart that we had someway to fight those creatures…

"And then he changed." She said, turning her face to the rocky and dusty ground beneath her feet. "He turned into a beast with fangs and claws and he tore through so _many_ of them, growling like the dog he resembled. Somehow we made it out alive, but the knight couldn't find us." She paused, swallowing hard. "It was just the two of us for a while. But there were too many dead, so I turned as many as I could every night. But many fell. Like the groundskeeper. I thought I was saving them. Taking away their wills, yes, but what else was I to do?" Her head shook as if to dismiss the question unanswered. "It seemed to be working until…

"I can tell the rest later. If you are who you say you are then… what now?" Her eyes, still very tired, only now emotional as well, looked up and studied the unconscious way that Lavi held Kanda against him, with gentleness and care. She smiled softly. "I'm sorry, I thought your girlfriend was a man. I hope you're not insulted."

"Yuu-chan you mean?" Lavi blinked, incredulous, before a deep blush spread across his features. "Y-Yuu-chan _is _a man…"

Ursa looked almost ashamedly away. "Then forget I called him your Nancy."

With a little chuckle Lavi shifted until he could lean Kanda against the wall, brushing his fingers through the side of the samurai's dangling hair. With a little reluctant sigh he pushed himself into a crouch and then, with a little mischievous grin, leaned down to brush his lips on the Japanese man's. Ursa, still looking away, did not notice. "Well, as nice as it to talk about how pretty Yuu is, I'm gonna have to ask you to try and deactivate your Innocence if you can, being I'm pretty damn sure that's what you've got on your chest." He said, reaching for his own. "See the glowing green stuff? That means active. Yours does it too."

"How exactly does one _deactivate_ this… divine crystal, exactly?" Ursa's tone was distinctly incredulous, and her eyebrows arched over her dark eyes as if she didn't specifically trust him to tell her.

"Allen would be better at explaining it to you; he's parasitic like I think you are…" Lavi complained, but held out his weapon as an example all the same. "It's… the Innocence tells my arm what to do, then my arm tells my brain, then my brain tells my Innocence. It works the same way backward. Have your brain tell your nerves to tell your Innocence that you don't need to defend this town anymore." He said, and holstered his hammer in a hurried sweep, smiling at her disbelieving look. "It helps a lot if you believe it."

With a frown, Ursa reached up and touched the stone with her fingertips. Her eyes remained focused on Lavi, however, as she spoke to him. "Because you haven't changed like the others, I'll trust you." She smiled a little crookedly, "Though I'm curious why your friend has a harder time of things than you do. Any idea why that might be?" She questioned, furrowing her eyebrows.

"Vampires are a lot closer to humans than house cats are," Lavi said after a short moment of thought. "The other vampire I know is pretty normal." He grinned at his own horrible reference to Crowley, but didn't laugh at his own joke, knowing she wouldn't get it, before taking a step back to give her space. She nodded at him, as if it to cue him that she was prepared to trust him regardless of his ridiculousness and stupidity – mainly because of how he treated his companions, he didn't know.

"It's alright," Ursa whispered to herself, as if speaking to a very small child. "We don't have to fight anymore." Nothing happened. Ursa stood with her left hand on her chest, right hanging at her side, eyes closed, and a snowflake fluttered through the roof to settle in Lavi's hair. It was the first of many. He reached up and brushed it away indifferently, but it was not until his hand came to his side again that the change occurred to him. There had been nothing to catch his fingers on, no fur or cat ears, just his own, mud and blood caked hair, unruly and tangled on top of his head. Startled, the redhead patted the sides of his head and found – to his relief – his own ears back where they were supposed to be, the loops of his earrings dangling next to his skin.

Behind him, Kanda made a sound like a groan and then – to Lavi's horror – a noise the apprentice Bookman had become familiar with. He retched sickly, loudly enough for Lavi to turn to him and move through the suddenly dark room, stumbling over rocks hidden in the water shadows around them.

Kanda felt very cold. It was the one thought that made sense to him, how _cold_ he was, as well as how warm the liquid was that filled his mouth. He knew what it was by the taste of it – salty and metallic – and he knew what had happened by how suddenly deaf and blind he felt, hunched against a wall, puking blood. At least it wasn't his blood, he knew. It was Lavi's blood, and maybe pork blood from earlier, but it still looked fucking _awful_ coming out of his mouth. Like he was dying or something. It didn't _feel_ much better either, to have it leaking out his nose and choking him, getting in the way of lungs that weren't used to taking in air. The Japanese man couldn't think very well with that happening.

He could, however, make out the touch of a warm hand on his back much like before, and the sound of his name on a pair of worried lips.

Kanda let the redhead hold him. He was freezing, and sick, and dizzy, and tired, and the very last thing he wanted was to be _alone_ on top of all of those – not right now with his own body rebelling against him. When his stomach stopped convulsing enough to allow him to breathe, he turned back and looked up at Lavi, who grimaced at the sight of his face. Kanda knew his mouth and lower jaw were covered in blood, his lips also, and felt by the trembling in his jaw that he was indeed lacking in heat the way he felt. The redhead touched the side of his face, and Lavi's fingers were fire on his skin.

"Take Moyashi," Kanda heard himself say. "I'll be fine."

The redhead's smile seemed too slow, for some strange reason. "He rubbin' off on you too, Yuu-chan?"

He made to reply but he was throwing up again, dry heaving, and he felt like his eyes were going to pop out of his skull at any moment, his face was going to fall off. He realized that he could hardly feel his limbs at all at some point, but things had become foggy, distant, strange. Before it happened he knew what was coming. Knew there was no way to stop it. So he turned his body toward Lavi and reached for him, though why he wanted to he could only guess.

The samurai's fingers brushed the edge of Lavi's coat before he fell.

-- -- --

Lenalee had brought in coffee despite the hour, worried. Bridget had thanked her, said something about how she needn't serve the lowly science department members if she didn't want to, and then gone back to work. The Chinese girl had once again explained that she still enjoyed the pastime and then headed off to see her brother, silently hoping that he would be alone and have a word.

She paused outside of the door to listen, standing on the side of the door that the hinges were on, just in case Leverrier came out in a lethal rage again. The bastard – and she could stand to think of him of such despite her usual niceness – had a habit of saying horrible things to her when that happened, which had been almost constantly since Allen's sudden disappearance. Of course the British boy had called in, as had the others, and Komui hadn't pressed the issue of leaving without his escort over the phone, but that did not quell the inquisitor's ire. Instead it burned darker and hotter, and he lashed out in ways that only made the people around him dislike him more. At the rate his popularity was falling, it would take a miracle to stop his assassination within a year.

Even the greatest Crow assassin, which Leverrier was not, could not ingest cyanide.

The thought gave her courage.

"—Walker isn't the only _problem_ here, Supervisor. The other two aided him in his escape."

"If that's the case, Inspector, I'm afraid you'll have to try every person who has taken their phone calls since departure _and_ the crew who served them breakfast before leaving _as well_ as the group who saw them off for aiding him. None of that sounds like _escaping_ either."

"He left without permission."

"He had permission to leave on that day. I told him nothing about the means by which he had to do it."

"You're telling me that Allen Walker is smart enough to find a loophole that pathetic, find a train, and take it just to _spite _me?!"

"Not everything is _about_ you, Inspector. I believe he did it because he feels as if he is being stalked by your assistant."

There was a short sound like awkward laughter and the light ruffling of papers. Lenalee did love it when her brother could keep his head in a dire situation. "The perhaps he would enjoy confinement better."

"Confining him is not an option, you know that. Losing an Exorcist or locking one up – let alone _three_ – would put us at a deficit that will _lose this war_. Even if you see them as lambs for you to sacrifice, you know that you cannot waste them foolishly."

He was toeing the line, nearly being insubordinate. There were two ways this could go, Lenalee knew. There would either be yelling and Komui would have to apologize, or Leverrier would see and understand, and have to think. She waited. Her brother's talents at manipulation were growing more adept by the day – he knew now that there was no way to avoid thing but to try and bend Leverrier's desires to his own.

For a moment, there was nothing but silence.

"Then how do you suggest we discipline him, Supervisor?"

A chair creaked. Her brother had relaxed into his chair. A small victory. "If there's anything Allen Walker loves, it's food, and a variety of kinds of it. Give him plain rice, plain meat, and steamed broccoli for two weeks and he'll never want to sneak away again. A diet like that shouldn't make him too unhealthy, either." He paused, and Lenalee imagined that he had turned his attention to his quill, the way he would when Reever wanted something and he just wasn't in the mood to be nice about giving it, no matter what it was. "The other two most likely just trusted his word about the train and assumed he had permission. I doubt it was anything malicious." There was another break, and she heard someone slurp – Komui – and then a soft contented sigh. That was fake. His coffee had long since grown cold.

"We shall have to see."

The phone rang. Leverrier excused himself. Lenalee slid into the far corner of the hall when he opened the door and started down it in the opposite direction, completely missing her. She slipped inside soundlessly, moving on her slippers with delicate steps that not even Komui noticed until the door was shut behind her. He looked up from his stack of papers, lifted the phone, and smiled at her.

"Hello!" The word was half meant for her and she smiled right back. She would have hugged him for his earlier display if not for that. She took the coffee cup he was using and put it on her tray, the replaced it with the warm bunny-print one she had brought with her. He took it in his hands almost at once. "Lavi?"

Lenalee paused.

"_Hey, Komui. Just callin' to tell you that we found the Innocence. And the akuma. But we might take a while to get back." _Lavi's voice was tired sounding in Komui's ear and the Chinese man glanced at the clock on the wall – just after eleven – and frowned. It seemed very late to be calling in when they could just call on their way back in the morning.

"How are things then?"

"_Well…Yuu-chan's throwing up all of the blood in his stomach, and he was shot, looks like hypothermia, too. I just feel really slow, now that the cat-parts are gone…"_

"Would you like me to seek approval for use of the Ark?"

"_No."_ Lavi responded as Lenalee stiffened in front of him. She didn't much like using Allen to use the Ark. _"Allen's got a crushed chest bone and two broken clavicles. He wouldn't be able to sit up to play._"

"You're not wounded that badly?"

The apprentice Bookman chuckled. _"Well, besides being tired and half-deaf and worried sick… no, I'm fine. Just bumps and scratches. Though, I think Bookman is gonna want my head when I get back… never mind. Everything ok there?"_ The question seemed offhanded, as if he didn't really care how Komui answered as long as it distracted him. It was a part of the Supervisor's job that he rarely got to fill anymore.

"Lenalee just brought me the most delicious coffee, _mmhmm,_ smells _divine_," Komui watched his sister smile and listened to Lavi laugh softly at once, both of them less than awake. He didn't mind that. They still smiled and laughed and the expressions were real, so it couldn't have been all bad. "I'm curious though, how is it that Kanda-kun has become hypothermic? And Allen… how did that happen to him and not to anyone else?"

Lavi made a little sound and said something away from the receiver before he sighed. _"The vampire thing. Because Yuu stopped breathing – because he didn't need to – his temperature went down. He still had a heartbeat, but that didn't make him much warmer. When the Innocence stopped affecting him, he was so cold that… it happened."_ He stopped to say something else away from the phone before he went on. _"Allen got pummeled by a snaky person and Ursa which is… a really long story. He's awake. I'm gonna go see him."_ Lavi made a sound then like a yawn, and Lenalee crinkled her brow at her brother, wondering perhaps how it was that things had unraveled on the mission. Komui decided that this was not the moment to sate her curiosity.

"If anything changes, call back as soon as possible. I can send a Finder to bring the Innocence back if—"

"_It's ok."_ Lavi interrupted softly. _"Besides, it's Ursa's. She's an accommodator."_

-- -- --

To his slight surprise he didn't feel as bad as he had before, not in the least, thought he felt numb over more than half of his body, like someone had just cut away the skin and replaced it with someone else's. The thought was disconcerting. He slowly, fearing the harshness of the lights, dragged his left eye open in time to see a hand coming for his face, that wasn't Lavi's or Kanda's. It touched his forehead, the thumb running across his scar very slowly.

When there hadn't been a scar, Mana had put him to sleep that way.

"…accommodator." Allen hardly heard the word it was so distant, but he did pick it out despite the beeping and whirring by his head.

A woman wearing a worn looking dress and a blanket over her shoulders leaned down at him, smiling. He didn't understand. Lavi was supposed to be here, and it wasn't as if Lavi had turned into a woman. Her hair was back in a messy bun, though it didn't look bad on her, just a bit strange. "How are you feeling?" Her voice was too soft to try and recognize. A townsperson, maybe, or someone he had asked questions on the street and then never talked to again until now. Whatever the case, he made himself smile at her while he fought with the gauze over his right eye and, inevitably, lost.

"Numb," Allen whispered, and he watched a little smile lift her lips. "But warm. And…" Lavi came in the door to his right and he couldn't see him, but he heard a little clearing of the older boy's throat, so he still knew. His head didn't much like rolling across his pillow away from the woman, but he still managed, wincing and pinching his eyebrows together in discomfort. The redhead smiled at him, which wrinkled the little bandage under Lavi's left eye and pulled his head up to expose the large circle of gauze around his throat, the left side of which had started to bleed through.

Lavi looked tired. "Hey 'Sprout, how ya feeling?"

"Sleepy," he got out the last word he had wanted to say but hadn't managed. "What… happened with the shadow? I passed out after Kanda threatened you. And…" he looked first at Lavi's head and frowned, and then turned his eyes around the room. The room wasn't private, but instead much like the infirmary at the old Order, with six beds to each wall, and supplies at each end. Like all hospitals he could remember, the majority of the room was white. White walls and ceiling, tiles just a shade closer to pink, lights that put everything in stark, uncomfortable contrast. There were yellow curtains, all drawn back, that circled the beds, a means to divide them from each other if the need arouse. His eyes came back to Lavi's face. "There's something wrong."

"Really?" The apprentice Bookman's eyebrows lifted as if in curiosity. His right hand, sporting a bandage around the wrist and missing its fingerless glove, reached up and ran through his hair. His jacket was gone, replaced by a loose fitting gray shirt that didn't weigh on the few superficial wounds he had received in comparison to the others. His pants where Order issue, as were his socks, but his boots had been replaced with flat white slippers that covered his toes. "I wonder what that could be."

"The cat ears are gone…" Allen frowned a little, almost pouting, and reached out with his right hand as if cheated. He looked rather pathetic with his swollen face, wounds, and a pout. The white haired teen could have been some poor lost child wanting to pet a stray dog. "It's too bad, really. I'd have liked to pet you more." Allen mumbled, and his hand fell limp next to the bed, hanging loosely. "Kanda kind of monopolized you," he observed with a snicker.

Lavi reached out and took the boy's hand in his, then knelt enough to place the hand on top of his head. "You can still pet me, see? _Prr…"_

"Now it's perverted."

"Only if you're dirty minded!"

"Which you are."

Ursa let out a nearly silent laugh, high and strange, before she covered her mouth with her hands. "I could always kiss you again, Lavi." She offered, which – to her slight surprise – got her a loud grunt from the bed to Allen's left, the occupant of which the British boy had somehow failed to see in his cursory sweep of the room. Instead of asking, however, he remained distracted by what Ursa had said.

"Again?"

Lavi turned his attention away from Allen and Ursa, aware that she was about to proclaim herself the shadow and once again have someone question her certainty. Instead he pushed himself up and moved around the bed to the one next to Allen's, pushing back the curtain enough to let him see Kanda there, laid out against the crisp bedding, eyes shut. The samurai was pale still, though now it was due to a lack of nutrition rather than being mostly dead, and it showed in the lines of his face. His eyes were still too deep in his skull, his cheek bones too hollow, but the purplish quality to his lips was fading fast. The wound on his side had caused quite a bit of blood loss, but the Japanese man still had the strength to open his dark blue eyes and look up at the redhead, lids at half mast.

"Good morning, Cupcake."

"Che." Kanda looked down at his left arm, at the needle sticking into his skin that fed him fluids, and frowned. "Some morning." A pause. "Fucker."

Without word the apprentice Bookman lowered himself to the floor next to the bed, leaning on the mattress, looking up at the samurai. His fingers shook a little as he reached up and touched Kanda's right hand, a little brush of contact that made the Japanese man look at him, blinking. Lavi pretended not to notice. He touched the samurai's fingers very gently, following the lines and bumps of his calluses, until Kanda grabbed his hand and held it firm, though much more loosely than Lavi might have imagined.

"Yuu-chan…" Lavi started, and he could not take his eyes from Kanda's fingers. Not for the life in him. They were still very cold in his hand, even if they were better off than they had been. He didn't need to speak for a moment, so instead he leaned his head on the mattress and pressed Kanda's hand under his chin, cool fingers against his throat. He wanted to say that he was worried. That he had been worried and still was. He wanted to know, more than anything, that Kanda was fine, would be fine, and that there was nothing to concern himself over, and that they could go home and just do nothing for two weeks, pretending that their leave would last forever. But he couldn't have it. Even if he opened his mouth and made those things known, he couldn't have them. Words were useless, even if he had known what to say.

Kanda pulled his hand away and rolled on to his left side, exposing the swath of his back that wasn't covered by the hospital gown he was wearing. Lavi wanted at once to push himself up on the mattress and kiss it, but he shook his head the way he would have if the urge had been feline. Instead he spread his arms out across the mattress and gently touched that strip of flesh with his fingers, tickling along his lover's spine.

Silence settled between them.

A long moment slipped by, and the Bookman-in-training found himself tuning out what Allen was saying, though he should have recorded it, his face pressed to the soft, plush surface of the mattress. His hands grew still. The bed, even if the Japanese man hadn't been there very long, smelled like Kanda. Lavi closed his eyes at it, and sighed from the bottom of his chest.

"Che. _Baka Usagi._"

"Ngh?"

Kanda's voice was very quiet, almost indistinguishable, but Lavi lifted his head a bit to hear it better. "Are you going to just sit there or get in?" The samurai growled, and the low, straight line of his ponytail slid down his pillow, snaking against his back. In a rush the redhead stood and, grinning and twitching his eyebrows at Allen and Ursa without a care as to what they thought, closed the curtain around Kanda's bed, watching the little loops of metal at the top catch when he changed angles. When it was just the two of them, incased in soft yellow light from all sides, Lavi slipped off the shoes he had been given and floundered his way onto the bed, taking up his place behind the Japanese man without even pausing. Kanda shifted back into him, regardless of the blanket between them.

Lavi buried his face in the samurai's throat, breathing him in, and hooked his arm around his lover's chest.

"Watch the bullet hole."

"I will, I will," Lavi whispered, putting the hand he had looped around the samurai's chest a little higher. He didn't care where he had to touch, or that there were two people sitting not six feet behind him, or that a nurse might come in and see. It was only him and Kanda, pressed together, and a little pile of something he had never known between the two of them. Kanda relaxed and, in a few moments, his breathing came in slow, sleepy waves. Peaceful. He rocked back a bit more and Lavi let him, then lifted his knees until they fit more evenly, his mouth pressed to the soft, lively skin between his lover's neck and shoulder. The Japanese man's mouth opened and he could feel it, feel the little change in his breathing before Kanda spoke.

"Don't call me, _Cupcake_, either. Ever. I'll kill you."

Lavi's mouth smiled against Kanda's skin, wide enough that he could only kiss the samurai to avoid discovery. "Alright, Yuu."

-- -- --

**You like? Different than planned… but… plans are meant to be ignored, right?**

**Not too fast? I promise that little things will be explained in chapters to come. Kanda's mark problem, Allen's eye – you shall hear things. :3**

**Reviews are still loved!**


	22. Return and Disorientation

**Long. "Late." Exponential. **

**Leverrier is not as much of an ass as he should be if it were canon. Two reasons for that: my Komui has balls and this isn't an angsty-emo-OMG-heresy! Fic.**

**I do not own D. Gray – man.**

**Warnings: Shounen-ai.**

**-- -- --**

Part Twenty-One: Return and Disorientation

Lavi prayed that the special treatment Order members were given – like the ability to see their comrades at such a ridiculous hour – went further than that. His eye fell shut while he thought about it, while he worried, and the lights dimmed a bit, until he realized that his concern had followed him into his sleep. With his face buried in Kanda's hair, he tried to fight it off. And then there was something warm and thin and light draped over his shoulders and it woke him completely, pulling his very tired eye open.

The nurse had found him. But she just smiled and told him to keep Kanda warm and put a hot water bottle at the end of the bed before checking the samurai's fluids and bandages. From there she left their partition and he was alone again with Kanda, warm and close and left for what remained of the evening. That near to Kanda though, he didn't want to sleep. Sleeping would mean missing the chance to watch the samurai's expression and perfectly gentle posture, as well as his eyes fluttering beneath their lids. For that reason it took the greater part of an hour for Lavi to drift off again, only to wake when the Japanese Exorcist began to tremble slightly. Lavi held him closer, awake enough to remember the nightmare that had roused the samurai in front of him once before.

Kanda did not suffer that dream, but turned enough to pull the apprentice Bookman against him and open his eyes to the redhead, woken all the same.

In the stillness they kissed, silently. They gathered each other up and remained as close as they could be, given the circumstances, and neither protested when the other started to fall asleep again. Instead Lavi leaned his face a bit more surely against Kanda's forehead, looking at his closed eyes, and barely broke the silence with the words that filled his mouth to brimming.

"Do you remember what happened when we left the cemetery?" Lavi asked, but the eyelids in front of his did not lift. With a soft smile he guided his lover's hand up to him and placed it around the nape of his neck, entwining them more closely. "You were so cold and breathing so strangely and I was so _worried_ that I put you in my coat to try and make you warmer." He chuckled softly, and curled the hand that was pressed the back of his neck so that it slid into his hair, stroking through the fine strands at the base of his skull. "I didn't think hammer travel would be very good for either of you, so Ursa and one of the townsfolk who used to be an animal-creature, we carried you guys to the nearest carriage and had you taken here."

"Che. Why are you interrupting my sleep for this?"

"Because I wanted to tell you, that when we got here… all I could think about was how much easier it would be to watch someone you don't love suffer. Part of me tried to let go, to stop, but I really, really, _couldn't_. It didn't work. I just felt worse."

"Great." Kanda growled, and pulled the redhead into something resembling a comfortable position across his chest. The samurai held him there, wincing from the slight twinge in his side that still remained of the wound Mörder had given him. "Welcome to my world, _Baka_. I didn't want to love _you_ either. Still happened. Get over it and go to sleep."

Lavi stopped the Japanese man from rolling away with a touch of his fingers against the side of his face. Shaking slightly, painfully uncertain, the apprentice Bookman laid his face on the inside of Kanda's chin and kissed the warm skin there, then moved up the edge of the samurai's jaw, over to the corner of his mouth. Rather than give the Japanese man the satisfaction one final brush of lips and then silence, Lavi pulled away in an effort to speak with him again, for a moment. "What I mean…" He had to pause to find a way to phrase what he intended. "Is that I'm ok with it. Even if I'm _screwed_, I'm ok with loving you forever and ever and ever, ok?" He searched for the only marginally older man's eyes in the darkness.

The breath caught in Kanda's throat for some reason. "There is no forever," he whispered, cool steel under the words.

Lavi frowned. "You love me, though."

"And?"

Lavi shifted back a bit, sure that he wasn't putting weight on Kanda's wound, and relaxed into his counterpart, silent. He waited until Kanda's arms draped around his back before he opened his mouth again, horrified of the words that would come out and yet praying for them all the same. "Then however long we have, Yuu-chan… let's make it feel like forever…" He let his eye fall closed.

"Che… sap."

"Mmhmm…" Lavi agreed with a smile. "This feeling thing isn't so bad, you know?"

"Go to sleep."

"Why should I?"

"Because I'm tired."

"Oh. Look at that. Yuu-chan. Master of logic. I have to sleep because _he's_ tired."

"You'll wake Moyashi."

"Psh. You'll pretend not to care if I do…"

Kanda made an annoyed sound and placed his right hand firmly over Lavi's mouth, stilling it. With nothing but a sigh he closed his eyes and pulled the apprentice Bookman up a bit, still holding his mouth shut. "If you're quiet now, I'll make you scream later," he promised softly, then moved his fingers away, as if half expecting Lavi not to understand what he meant.

The redhead pulled the dark haired man so they were once again beside each other, Lavi's arms twined around his back. In the past Kanda would have reacted with annoyance at being held so close. But now, the apprentice Bookman's words must have reached him, must have forced him to understand what it was that bothered his lover – the sense of fear and worry clawing at the inside of Lavi's chest. Fear. Lavi wanted more than anything for it to go away, but the only weapon he knew to use was Kanda's presence.

The samurai held him. Fear, they both knew, was a weakness in most circumstances, but now it wasn't. Now it was worse.

Lavi knew Kanda wouldn't want to say that he cared, or that he would be ok, or that Lavi didn't need to feel afraid. It was too much. The samurai didn't know a way to say those things and yet not show anymore of his own heart than he had, without wounding what remained of his pride, so Lavi didn't expect it of him.

Kanda's hand snaked beneath the fabric of Lavi's shirt so that his fingertips touched skin, his face moved to the redhead's chest.

"Sleep, Lavi," Kanda whispered against the gray fabric of the shirt brushing delicately across his nose. "Just… sleep."

The redhead curved down around him like a protective shell, the blanket between them little more than a nuisance, one hand on his lover's back, and the other tucked into the Japanese man's hair. The touch of Lavi's lips to Kanda's forehead made the redhead smirk – such a soothing thing done for his own sake seemed a bit ridiculous to him.

"Will you say it, Yuu-chan?" Lavi prayed his lover would know what he wanted, though he doubted it would be so simple. He curled his fingers in Kanda's hospital gown.

"_Aishiteru."_

"Huh?"

He was falling asleep, and the words on his lips sounded slurred and airy, distant, like something he would say without thinking._"I love you,"_ his right hand touched the one on his clothes very gently. "Sleep."

Lavi giggled.

Kanda would have punched him for it, but Lavi knew he was too comfortable and too _content_ to try. Instead Kanda closed his eyes and breathed in the ink-and-ozone scent that had come to cling to the redhead, a smell that made his face break in an awkward, crooked grin. Lavi saw it in that moment, with his arms draped around Kanda and the half-dimmed lights shimmering above them, the little flicker of a broken smile on his lover's mouth. The urge to kiss those lips was too hard to resist, so he leaned down enough to do it, guiding Kanda in a slow, paced exploration of both of their mouths. He felt, deep in his chest, that there was nothing wrong with showing the emotions that burned behind his breast bone, the fear and love and desire, but he couldn't do it all now. Languidly, he could kiss the man before him, touch the little places he hadn't before, and enjoy every prickle of pain the touches caused, the constricting in his chest. It did cause pain. Every brush of his fingers was the same as a brand on his skin.

_I love him so much…_ Lavi thought, pulling away from Kanda's very flushed face just long enough to see the obvious exhaustion in his eyes. _Even though I don't want to give up my future… I will… for him. If only he'll have me._

"No more," Kanda growled against Lavi's lips. "Not until we're home."

"Sorry, Yuu."

-- -- --

The curtain kept out the morning sun but it didn't keep out the nurse who came to change Kanda's bandages. He wasn't in the mood to be poked, prodded, and fussed over, so he tore off the dirty ones and gave them to her, then showed the well faded pink-white scar that would remain for about twelve more hours before it would be gone also. Kanda smiled to himself when she left, a disbelieving look on her features.

He turned his attention to the redhead who had slept through it all, curled into a ball at his side. With gentle fingers he stroked Lavi's hair the way he might have petted his ears, hooking it in his grasp, then letting it slide away like water through his hand. The brush of it on his palm coupled with the lack of reaction on the apprentice Bookman's face, the harsh lighting and the scent of alcohol and metal, made Kanda want to do nothing but curl himself up and do, for once, _nothing._ Maybe it was the desire to be close that willed him to do it, he didn't know, but he fought it all the same.

"Yuu-chan…" Lavi's voice was very small from sleep, and he reached out with his arms until he took Kanda by the waist and dragged himself closer. The way his head tilted against the sheets made his hair seem a shade closer to brown than usual, deadened by the hue around it. "Don't get up yet. I wanna cuddle."

"Che. I don't cuddle." Kanda flicked Lavi's right ear and watched him flinch. "I share space," he clarified more softly.

Yet the samurai didn't move away. He buried his fingers in Lavi's hair, leaned back into the pillows, and tilted his head against the wall with a sigh. Healing made him tired. With his eyes on the white painted ceiling he tried not to think about what that could mean and simply let his hand go, feeling the press of Lavi's forehead against his hip. No part of him was numb or dead, not anyplace having to do with the wound or otherwise, though he had to admit his stomach felt funny. He tried not to think of that, also.

"Yuu?"

"What?"

The redhead looked up at him, face smashed awkwardly against the mattress. "When we get home… after I… talk to Panda…" He paused and his fingers curled on Kanda's hip, "Can we… have... do… you know…"

Kanda felt his face crack into an awkward smile. "You want to have sex with me again?"

"Ew." Allen's voice was just hardly audible from the other side of the curtain.

The samurai rolled his sapphire eyes and smiled at his lover's slightly rouged cheeks. "I want to," Kanda admitted in a whisper, his fingers still Lavi's hair. "Why do you want it so bad? Because you _know_ now?" He ran his palm back to the base of the redhead's neck, then stroked down it, fingering the line of his collar.

"Something like that…" Lavi nodded into the bed. "And the more I touch you, the hotter you look, and stuff. I just wanna…" He moved his arms again, higher on Kanda's chest. _"Mine."_

"Che."

"Really!" The apprentice Bookman looked up at Kanda and smiled again, more widely, his eye dancing with delight. His features, made almost sallow by the yellow curtain at that angle, were entirely sincere in their emotion. He looked genuinely happy. "I know that you're not my possession or something, but… I've never had anybody like I have you. You're… it's like…" He stopped with a confused expression to find words. "When we met Ursa, I didn't even care that she had boobs. Didn't look once. Because I know that I have you and I don't have to look anymore, even though that goes against _Lavi_."

"You keep saying things like that and I don't get them." Kanda growled.

"Like what?" Lavi blinked innocently, his bright green eye round from effort.

The Japanese man sighed, but did not pretend even for a moment that he was angry at the other Exorcist, only mildly frustrated. His fingers trailed to the redhead's eye-patch and paused there, feeling the rough fabric against his callused fingers. "You talk about yourself like you're someone else. _Lavi_ this and _Lavi_ that – you even said that you named yourself that when I called you _baka_." Kanda explained, but he didn't draw his hand away, only narrowed his eyes in annoyance.

The redhead stared at the older man, thin eyebrows pushed together almost apologetically. "You weren't around in the Ark when it happened… but I still thought you knew…" Lavi whispered, and pushed himself up enough to sit on his feet facing the dark haired man. His face became unusually serious. "When I tried to kill Allen… you know what happened then, right?"

Kanda rolled his eyes. "Lenalee said something about the death of your heart, I never heard the details."

"Oh, well…" Lavi looked down and then up again, as if the movements distracted him from something else. He finally rocked back and took Kanda by the hand, looking at his fingers. "You know that every war I've been to, every different one I've recorded, I've had a different name, and you know that someday I'm supposed to be like Bookman. No name, no mark on the world, no heart, just… a living record." The redhead paused, his palm pushed at Kanda's as a distraction. "The whole trouble with me feeling is that it's not _Lavi_ feeling. It's _me_. The first me. I'm so broken though, that I don't even know if that's me, or if Lavi is, or if Bookman Junior is me or..." He looked up. "It gets confusing. I don't know who I am sometimes because… I still have my persona but… I keep… it's like I'm…" He tapered off, unable to come up with words, and a look of uncertainty began to cover his eye like a fog.

"You're not broken," Kanda sighed and shook his head, then leaned slowly forward until he kissed the apprentice Bookman very softly on the lips. The tender press of skin on his hand and the catch of breath against his mouth cued him to do it again, more deeply, as if searching for something the larger man could give him. He didn't need to understand all of it, not really, not when he understood the brush of Lavi's fingers on his chest and the shuddering way the redhead breathed his name when they parted. What did it matter that Lavi hadn't always been Lavi? He was Lavi now. He was Lavi and Kanda _loved_ Lavi.

He felt like a fool thinking it, but that didn't make it untrue.

"Can you guys snog a little more quietly?" Allen's voice came as little more than a whisper into the space the two shared. "It's a bit difficult to sleep with the two of you trying to eat each other alive not two meters away."

Lavi pulled away from the samurai and tilted his face toward the yellow curtain, grinning. "You're just jealous because I got him and you didn't—_ow!"_ The redhead turned back to the man who had just bit painfully into his right ear and scowled. "What was that for!?"

Kanda released the ear between his teeth and let a crooked, honest smile creep across his face, lifting the left side of his lips a bit higher than the right. "You haven't _'got'_ me, _baka_. Besides, Moyashi is too fucking stupid to even compete. _Brat._"

"_Allen."_

Kanda pushed himself up a bit, standing so that the short length of his hospital gown billowed around his legs in a completely immodest display of his thighs. Kanda didn't particularly care about keeping himself under wraps with Lavi right there, wanting him, eyes drinking him in shamelessly. There was no point in being worried unless someone opened the door. He wasn't about to sleep with the redhead, not _here_ at least, but he would tease if he wanted. And maybe smirk. And take his Goddamn time reaching under the bed for the brown paper bag that contained his clothes.

The material of his coat was still muddy, and damp when he pulled it out. The red fringe around the seams showed a sort of sickly puce, the paint on the buttons had cracked and peeled away from the silver underneath. There was a great deal of blood and a rather flakey black burn mark around the place that Mörder – the Akuma – had put his gun, blasting it with gunpowder. The damage could be repaired, just washing the jacket would improve its looks by no small amount, but it still warned him. His own stomach had suffered the same the night before.

Lavi's fingers on his gown tugged him closer to the bed, touching the very place he was thinking about. "Yuu-chan…"

"What?" He unfolded the coat and straightened it before shaking a few globs of dried dirt off and pulling it over his right shoulder. He ignored the fingers on his stomach.

"You've got me, you know?" Lavi's voice had fallen to a whisper, his fingers little more than feathers on fabric. _"Me_, not... _I_…" He tapered off as if it hurt to go on, hands shaking slightly.

Kanda brushed his fingers away, almost tenderly, befor closing his hand around them in something like a reassuring squeeze. It wasn't a reassuring squeeze, it was just a lot like one. "I know."

-- -- --

Link arrived with Lenalee on the fifth day of Allen's medical adventure, the first livid only until he saw the state the boy was in, broken like a doll in the hospital bed. Ursa had never felt more lost in her life. She wanted to stay with the British boy, because he explained the idea of parasitic Innocence much better than the flirty redhead did, and because most of the damage he had suffered had been her fault entirely. It was true that over the five days she spent mostly at his side she learned what exactly she was doing wrong in turning other people, as well as a bit more the dialect from around Liverpool, but that did not negate the guilt or the fear she felt for having caused him so much pain.

She soothed herself a bit by knowing that she had bandaged him that night when one of her people had bit him in the throat. So many things had happened that she had not intended, but saving his life had not been one of them. The more she thought about it, the more thankful she became that she had been dragged to the graveyard after a house call and had brought her medical bag with her.

The others though, were all so very _different_ that she was left, on the sixth morning, wondering what exactly she was going to do with herself.

Michael had always told her she had an appetite that could rival a man's, but now it was getting ridiculous. When the Chinese girl, Lenalee, caught her eating an entire rump roast by herself, Ursa wanted to simply crawl under the nearest piece of furniture and die – but Lenalee stopped her. The explanation of what exactly brought that on made the Englishwoman less worried, but it did not alleviate the sense of awkwardness that went with eating like a small hippopotamus.

Link though, was a different story. He reminded her a bit of the Japanese boy, with distinctly lighter hair and pencil-thin eyebrows, and legs that were so very short it made her feel like she had a relative. It was while he was reprimanding the white haired Exorcist in what might have been a very unsure sort of way, that she came to know why it was that he cared so much that the fifteen-ish-year-old had run away to begin with. What exactly that entailed she couldn't honestly say, but it didn't matter. Allen Walker was Allen Walker, as far as she knew him. Link or Noah wouldn't change that.

Kanda, as she came to know _Yuu_, struck her as the sort of person she could get along with as long as she pretended to keep her distance and didn't make kissing jokes with Lavi. The redhead and the samurai's relationship was terribly ambiguous, though it was obvious that they were close. She had to wonder _how close_ exactly when it became evident that the hammer-wielding teen often crept into bed with the other boy when he thought no one was looking, and Kanda took him in without complaint or even a pessimistic groan. They could have been childhood friends, or lovers, but she quickly decided that it wasn't her place to speak out either for or against such behavior. As long as they were happy and the church seemed satisfied with them, she had no place in calling what she thought she saw.

So on the seventh day, when Ursa found herself sitting in a first class train compartment with Kanda dozing in front of her and Lavi making awfully sensual eyes at the Japanese man, fingers braiding his hair, she had to wonder. Kanda did not like to be touched, it was obvious, and yet he would let the redhead do practically anything within reason as long as he was given the peace and silence he appeared to need so often. Was he just tolerant of an old friend? Or was _baka usagi_ some sort of pet name? And why did Lavi call him _Yuu_ or _Yuu-chan_? There was no _chan_ in _Kanda_ no matter how she spelled it in her head. Another pet name? She didn't know.

If Allen had been well enough to leave his hospital bed and come back with them, she would have asked the boy. It wasn't really her place, but that didn't stop her from wanting to know.

She thought about Michael a lot. She hadn't told the others, but she hadn't seen him since the night she had changed Lavi. She doubted she would ever tell them. If it turned out that one of them had killed him, she was better off not holding the grudge. They hadn't known her victims were people. And she had told Michael to kill anything that came looking for her. Those ideas together made her his murderer if he was truly dead.

She began to play with the tattered hem of her shawl when Lavi spoke to her, his naturally bright demeanor shining through all of the gray that she felt.

"So, Ursa…" He began, and the man beside him narrowed his eyes as if speaking was some kind of sin against him or something. "Is Ursa short for Ursula? I'm just curious."

"Is _chan_ a very funny way of spelling Kanda?" She shot back at once, then bit her lower lip and smiled around it, annoyed with herself. In a fight her quick tongue came in handy but in conversation it made her appear just a bit too defensive and curious for her own good. "Ehem. Yes, it's the short form, but I'd rather not be called _little bear_ if I can help it." She explained with a wide smile. "Is Lavi short for anything?"

"Nope!" The redhead chimed back at her, ignoring the _chan_ reference. "It's Hebrew for _lion._"

"Lucky us and our animal names."

"Better than being named something like…_distant._"

"Che." Kanda rolled his eyes at the pair, settling so his sword rested between his knees more comfortably. He made that sound a lot, but Ursa didn't ask why. It was like his default answer to anything he either didn't like, wasn't interested in, or couldn't respond to without thinking about for a very short moment. _"Baka."_ It might have been a curse or a term of endearment, it was hard to tell which.

Lavi smiled at them both. "Of course _stupid bunny_ is way better than Lavi _or_ Ursa. Isn't it Yuu?"

A slight pinking washed over the dark haired boy's face and Lavi elbowed him lightly in the side, as if teasing him somehow. Kanda didn't react violently, instead he frowned deeply, tightened his grip on his sword. That katana had to be his Innocence, and very dear to him.

"I really must ask though," Ursa broke in, head tilted to the side, eyebrows pushed together in the middle of her forehead. "Why is it that you call Kanda _Yuu_ all the time?"

The Japanese man stiffened.

Lavi grinned as if he had been waiting for that question all of his life. "He won't let me call him anything else." He was absolutely delighted until Mugen's hilt connected rather forcefully with his ribcage, driving the air from his lungs. He crumbled sideways, wheezing, and looked at the samurai with an expression more pained than it should have been, regret burning behind his eye. "What, Yuu? Want me to tell her I do it to tease you? Because that would be lying." He groused, and then pouted for good measure.

Ursa blinked at them, not quite sure what to make of the situation.

Kanda met her gaze for a moment, as if to try and decide if, this once, honesty was what the situation needed. "We're fighting a war," he growled almost stoically. "Companions either become friends, lovers, or baggage. It doesn't matter who or what you're fighting for, all wars are the same in that regard." He stopped and let his eyes wander out the window, as if the motion of his face would make saying what he meant easier somehow, or less damning. His features were very steady, as if what he was about to say something he was more than prepared to take the consequences of. "Some companions mean more than they should, no matter how much you want to hate them."

She felt a little smile on her lips. So it was like that, on some level. She didn't need details. "It's good you have each other then," she stopped worrying at her shawl and let her gaze follow Kanda's to the soft gray-white snow out the window. Pine trees and naked maples danced through her vision in a constant stream of bark and branches, beautifully chaotic. "Feelings transcend intent sometimes, like hope transcends fear."

"Wow," Lavi's voice almost made her look at him, very soft and awestruck. "That's pretty deep."

Ursa chuckled, then smiled softly at her reflection. The expression did not reach her eyes. "I suppose." She touched the stone on her chest, a strange, distant thought coming to mind. "Any road, I'll be damned if I can't have a lot of bottle and suss all of this. If I can get over the nosh bit, I think I'll be dandy." She glanced at the two of them, at the look of complete confusion on Lavi's face and the expression of indifference on Kanda's. She had to smile. "You don't speak British English, do you?"

Lavi simply shook his head.

"Then I guess this will give us something to do during the trip, won't it?"

-- -- --

The three arrived only to be greeted by a scowling Leverrier and a very tired looking Komui. Lavi smiled at them both, though the smile was a bit hard to hold when looking at the Inspector, and introduced Ursa. He thought she took the ordeal well for someone so new, grinning forcedly at the two, while Kanda hung back and openly glared, lip raised over his teeth in a silent sort of growl. That was a bit strange really, Kanda usually got on with authority figures.

Sometimes, the apprentice Bookman thought he was the only person who could lie about anything with any level of skill.

He saw the lines on Leverrier's face and knew at once that they were potentially in trouble for going with Allen without Link. Komui, by the looks of things, hadn't much liked getting the short calls they had had time for and then the one last night – there was usually more communication than that – but he still looked glad to see them. That was one thing one could count on, Komui welcoming them back regardless of the situation.

Lavi didn't particularly feel like being welcomed or reprimanded though. He wanted a hot bath and a nap. Preferably not alone either.

Leverrier cleared his throat. "Bookman Junior—"

"Please call me Lavi," the redhead stopped the Inspector short, which was something he had never done before, and felt his smile threaten to falter. Even now, looking at the taller, older man with his wicked eyebrows brushed back from his eyes like some artistic representation of Satan's horns, Lavi could not make himself stop feeling. This feeling though, was different. Anger, irritation, annoyance. There had been anger before, when he had thought Allen dead, and irritation when Lenalee had been too affected by that supposed death, but now there shouldn't have been anything at all for him to feel. These were little things – Leverrier hadn't done anything yet – but Lavi could not stop himself. His smile fell.

Maybe he wasn't Lavi right now. Maybe he was someone else.

The inspector cleared his throat, eyes narrowed. "The two of you left without a Finder and without Assistant Inspector Howard Link more than two weeks ago. We are under the impression that Allen—"

Lavi felt his fists clench. Leverrier wasn't interested in _them_ of course. He was interested in _Allen_. Because the poor guy didn't have enough issues just running around in his head.

Kanda cut the Inspector off. "Komui, I need to talk to you about this," he placed his right hand on his chest, over the place that Lavi knew the mark to be, and glanced for a moment at the redhead before his eyes went back to the Chinese man. His expression was unreadable. When no one immediately interrupted him, he went on, directing his words only at the Supervisor. "While on the mission it… did not perform as usual. But afterward it was fine. I should have… a lot left. Why would it—"

"Please talk about your personal problems after I have—"

The samurai's eyes narrowed dangerously at the Inspector who interrupted him, so much so that Leverrier stopped talking at it, jaw snapped shut. Kanda's expression did not soften. "You can't lecture a dead Exorcist can you?" He sneered, "This mark is my life, Inspector. And my life is your problem." He turned his face back to Komui, losing none of his bite. "Why would it slow down and then go back to normal." He demanded. It was odd of him. Regardless of how rude the Japanese man always was to his colleagues, it ended there. His supervisors and anyone who held authority over him were respected and generally given the silence and patience their positions demanded. There were occasions when Kanda said something less than perfect to Komui, but their relationship wasn't shortly defined as supervisor and subordinate – they had known each other too long for that.

Leverrier, though, was another story.

Komui looked between Ursa, Kanda, Lavi, and Leverrier as if weighing his options. He was reluctant to speak. "Kanda-kun, this might be something to talk about when we are alone." His voice was very soft, almost like he was speaking to a child and not to a man with a sword on his hip, and his eyes showed the same sort of kindness. "Anything I tell you now will be pure conjecture."

"Then conjecture, Komui. I'd rather not die tomorrow when I have stuff I can do today."

The scientist rocked awkwardly on his feet and silence settled between them. Komui wasn't usually one to want an interruption in this sort of situation, but he was searching for one now. His eyes went to Leverrier, begging for some rude snip at how this wasn't something to be talked about when the two were potential heretics already, but found nothing.

"If there was anything going on at the time – Ursa's Innocence, your change, anything – it could have done something to you. Lavi told me you stopped breathing but you had a heartbeat, and it is possible that that affected your ability to heal as you normally do…" Komui looked once again at Lavi and Leverrier before his eyes came back to Kanda. "Have you… looked?"

Kanda's eyes narrowed. "I just fucking got here. How the Hell am I supposed to look when the Inspector wants to be sure we're going to be good and not wander off with Moyashi again?" His eyes flashed at the Inspector, dangerously, and Lavi found himself suddenly no longer at ease with the situation. The samurai seemed very much in the mood to do something to get himself in even more trouble than they already were.

"Yuu-chan," Lavi whispered the name and, without a care for who they were in front of, took his lover by the hand, pulling his dark eyes away from the other two. The redhead lifted his lips in a shaky smile at the suddenly soft edge to Kanda's expression. He knew the man could glare at him, had glared, would continue to glare, but it was nice to know there could be something gentle to him, even if it was so simple. "Let him lecture us, I have to see Bookman when we're done too. So…" The redhead turned to Leverrier and made his expression blank. "Sorry we went with Allen without Link. He just felt stalked and wanted some time without a babysitter, we didn't think it'd hurt. He didn't do anything or run away or run into a Noah. He was just…" Lavi tapered off, trying to think of the proper word.

"A brat," Kanda cut in shortly.

"Well, he was very polite to me," Ursa chimed with a smile. "Even if I broke his chest bone and shattered his clavicles and dressed his wounds without anesthetic, he didn't even say one rude word."

Lavi grinned. He doubted she knew how very _Allen-like_ that behavior was, or how much of it was a lie considering how rude and obnoxious the boy could be when it came to sex and the like, but that just made it better. The way Komui's eyebrows lifted in understanding, the little ironic tilt to his lips, might have been cued.

Leverrier did not seem prepared to fight the word of three Exorcists at the moment and sighed, dejected. The lines of his face seemed deeper than normal, painfully so. "I will need to speak to Walker directly when he arrives but… if the two of you are entirely certain of his continued loyalty, there may not be a reason to report this mishap as I intended. I am not being lax. I am not letting him go unpunished. But if there was no harm meant or done…" His eyes wandered to Komui and he scowled, obviously disliking his own words. "We cannot afford to cast aside a force that can help us win this war." He said almost scathingly, lip raised.

Komui did not hide the relief that washed across his face, but he did keep from showing it with words.

Lavi released Kanda's hand when the samurai began to walk away, the unspoken dismissal obvious between the four of them. He followed the samurai at the same moment that he urged Ursa to speak to Komui, wanting at least one person distracted from what he was doing. Before he could catch Kanda and ask him what exactly was wrong, a motion caught his eye and dragged it into the corner of the room.

Bookman was standing in the shadows. He should have noticed before, but he hadn't.

The redhead stopped mid-step, fear, regret, pain, and something entirely unnamable settling into the very pit of his stomach, thick and heavy like rocks. He titled back and forth on his feet and his eye settled on the old man's gaze. Lavi was transparent. It didn't matter how well he could act or how good he could lie, Bookman would know. Bookman would see everything he had done and felt like he was wearing a sign around his neck that proclaimed it.

Lavi couldn't even breathe.

There were still so many questions to ask Komui, and he had a report to draft, and he want to be with Kanda – but Bookman was _right_ there, staring him down like a hunter looking into the eyes of a deer.

"I trust you went purely for the sake of watching the Destroyer of Time," Bookman's voice was a gravely whisper, nearly drowned by the sound of Kanda's retreating boots. The old man settled a bidi cigarette between his teeth and narrowed his eyes at his apprentice, the dark circles around them nearly blending into the shadows around him. Still, his mood was completely unreadable. "And not because those stupid ears you had came with pheromones."

"Gramps…"

The old man looked away to watch Komui, Ursa, and Leverrier depart down a different hall, the length of which was sprinkled with Finders observing the short woman walk slightly behind the two tall men. "What stupid thing did you do to have that look on your face?" Bookman folded his hands behind his back indifferently. "Find a woman?"

Lavi swallowed thickly and fought down the urge to run. How did he word this? It wasn't as if he told the old man about his failure on a daily basis anymore, not since he had learned how to _not fail_ at locking away his emotions. It had never been this hard before. But then again, he'd never been prepared to just give up. He'd never even thought about it. That was one reason _this _him was so frivolous – it made serious attachment that lasted harder to come by and kept his mind preoccupied. "No I um… I'm actually um… kind of… seeing… someone." No sooner had the words left his mouth than he closed his eye, not wanting to see his mentor's reaction. "I've never been this serious about anyone in my entire life and I just want to warn you that I might… I might…" _I do love him. I love him. I should just say it…_ "We…" His eyes came softly open.

The elder Bookman shot him a look that was a delicate balance between annoyance and condescension. "Go do your report and take a nap. You can't communicate properly when you get back from a mission tired. You say things you don't mean."

"Panda—"

"Lavi." There was no arguing with that tone. "Go."

With his teeth pressed to his lower lip, Lavi just looked down at the older man and fidgeted, unable to do anything for a moment. It was true he would feel better after a nap. It was true that he could never do anything right after a mission until he had one. But that didn't make his words any less true. Instead of pressing the matter he pressed his lips into a line and forced his mouth to move, slowly and softly, in order to convey the truth. "I slept with…Yuu-chan."

It should have been impossible to surprise Bookman. The old man should have shrugged and walked away indifferently. And yet Lavi watched Bookman's eyes flick toward him and then flick away before coming back again, perfectly round with shock. For a moment Lavi expected the old Panda to tell him to stop pretending and hit him upside the head for lying, but it didn't happen. Instead, Bookman frowned softly at him.

"Tell me everything."

-- -- --

The lotus looked exactly as it had when he'd left it. Not even a new wrinkle in an old petal. And he would have seen it if there had been – he knew every cell of that flower, every detail, every possible shadow in the given light. It was a bit disconcerting, really. There should have been _some_ difference. He _had_ been shot. But he was thankful that it hadn't lost another petal or otherwise wilted: if it was willing to give him free time he would take it, especially with how things had changed in his life since leaving.

Kanda peeled off his jacket and hung it over the foot of his bed, to be cleaned later, then toed off his boots, loose from the train ride. Meditating sounded splendid to him but he doubted he would actually do it at the moment. He was thinking too much, about the lotus, Mugen, Lavi – everything. But the thinking didn't irritate him like it usually did. It soothed him. As he eased himself onto his bed – still unmade from the night he and Lavi had shared in it – a flurry of emotion went through him. He couldn't glare at the wall the way he could before. Or smother the feeling in his gut. It was just there, a little hot burning feeling under the usual blistering cold of his exterior.

It was true that he loved Lavi, that he _cared_, but that didn't make understanding _happiness_ any easier. He wasn't worried or frustrated. And that person – that _important _person – seemed suddenly like something he could find easily, if only he took the time to look.

And if he had Lavi with him.

With a soft sound of confusion, Kanda laid himself onto his back and turned his eyes to the stone ceiling, running the events of the past week through his mind's eye. There should have been some damage, some _death_ of the lotus no matter how he looked at it, but that didn't matter. What bothered him at the moment was Lavi. The redhead had seemed set on coming with him to his room, most likely to be irritating with conversation and superfluous touching, but Lavi hadn't. It wasn't any of Kanda's business really, but it would have been nice to know that he was going to be left alone for a bit – he might have followed Komui or disappeared into a dark corner of the practice rooms for a while.

But instead he was here, lying around in his dirty clothes, thinking about Lavi.

Logic told him he should be worried about his life, not his lover.

Rolling sideways, Kanda settled his eyes on the wall and took a deep breath – his sheets smelled vaguely like Lavi's hair. And soap. It was fuel for his mental fire. Another little flutter of _happiness_ touched his chest, tightened his face, willed him to think more, but he tried not to. He wasn't that sappy. Even if he loved Lavi it wasn't as if he was about to lounge around in his bed and smell his Lavi-scented sheets with a smile.

He would lounge around in his bed and smell his Lavi-scented sheets with a scowl, instead.

There were things that Kanda didn't understand. Why Lavi touched him so much, why the redhead had been so willing to give himself up without thinking of it as a sacrifice, without thinking that maybe he should save himself for when he understood his feelings. The night they had slept together, when Lavi had looked up at Kanda like he could see the very fabric of his soul, he should have known how much it meant. Even now with the soft golden sunlight seeping in the window, the samurai could imagine that look of utter love and confusion on Lavi's face, and his throat began to constrict with it. It hurt a little, to think about the unfairness of what had transpired. Lavi had been willing to do anything, take anything, that Kanda had to offer, even if what he gave back would be painful and confusing.

It wasn't just sex, Kanda realized. It had never been just sex. That night, Lavi had given away his heart, too.

With a soft curse Kanda turned his face into the blankets and began to wonder if, maybe, everything he had said before that had been wrong.

-- -- --

Komui looked up at the woman and frowned, slightly uncertain that what she was saying could be even half true. A phone call from Allen from the Rothchild house and another from Lavi from the inn hadn't done the kind of numbers she was talking about justice. Hundreds of zombies? A little town like she was from shouldn't have had that many dead if they preserved the bodies for decades, and yet here she was, rubbing nervously at the stone in her skin, talking about how many there had been and how their teeth had been lethal to all townspeople caught in their grasp. She seemed honest, or at least she thought she was being honest, but it still didn't make any sense.

So there was more research to do. The Akuma, as well as the number of dead, needed to be explained, and this wasn't the person to do it.

He scribbled some notes on a piece of paper and, with a frown, made a mental one to inform both Winters and Klaud of Ura's existence. It wasn't important who she ended up with at the moment – he would decide that when he accessed who needed her more.

With a soft word of dismissal, he turned his attention to the phone beside him and frowned. Lenalee was still in that town with Allen until the boy could defend himself again, so he could ask her to look into things for him, if he wanted. The idea seemed satisfactory enough, though he doubted Bridget would approve of using an Exorcist to do the job of a Finder, as she would see it. He still lifted the phone and dialed, distractedly.

Was it really so odd for a brother to call his sister for an afternoon check up?

The golem on the other end of the phone line began to ring softly and he forced a smile, though he expected that it would be genuine by the time he actually heard his sister's voice. He counted three rings before he heard a moment of silence, and then Lenalee saying something away from the golem. The greeting came very clearly and happily, lacking the exhaustion that seemed to plague Ursa, Kanda, and even Lavi since their arrival.

"_Komui, I was just thinking that you were going to call." _Her voice had that smiling lilt to it that made him mirror it at once, his fingers tangled in the phone cord.

"Really? And why would did you think I would call?"

"_Is it really that odd for a brother to call his little sister for an afternoon check up?"_

Komui laughed softly and stifled the sound against the back of his left hand, in case someone heard. The day the supervisor was caught laughing on the phone would be the day Bridget burned him alive with a Bunsen burner. "Sometimes I think you're clairvoyant."

"_Only with you."_ Lenalee made a soft sound of amusement._ "So, what is it really?"_ She prodded, but the smile did not leave her voice. _"Allen has been fine, though he can't lift either of his arms very high and it's hard for him to eat. And Link actually seems to feel sorry for him. When he got here he was mad but now… Allen has to eat so much but it hurts to sit up and he wants to come home but he can't so…"_ She sighed, and he could imagine the way she shook her head with it, short hair bobbing with the motion. _"I wish he'd fractured his leg or something instead."_

That was a pretty terrible wish coming from a girl who relied on her legs for her livelihood.

"It can't be helped," Komui matched her sigh and leaned back in his chair, feeling comfortable for the first time since his sister had left. It was hard to work with Reever's coffee and Bridget's glares, not to mention Leverrier. He yawned. "In any case, could you look into a little something for me? If you get the chance to leave Allen's side, of course." He added, just to be safe.

Lenalee hummed a bit, as if thinking. _"What is it?"_

Komui reached for his cup of acid-coffee, intent on drinking it if he was going to yawn at three thirty in the afternoon. He bit back a gag after he'd sipped it. Bitter coffee did wake him up though, regardless of how awful it tasted. "The number of zombies reported seems to be a bit ridiculous for the number of dead there should have been. I want you to ask around, see if any near by towns are missing corpses, mortuaries, things like that. If the Akuma came from somewhere and picked up dead on the way, it might point us to the Noah." That wasn't entirely true, but it sure made the mission sound more important. "Ok?"

"_Sure. You keep an eye on Kanda and Lavi in return, ok?"_

"Oh?"

"_It's complicated. Just watch. I'll talk to you later."_

"Love you…"

She made that same exasperated sound she had since she had stopped clinging to his waist and started taking longer missions. _"You too, Komui."_

-- -- --

**You like?**


	23. Separation and Fairness

**An update. Yay. I'm super tired. I walked/biked 4.2 miles today and spent more than 4 hours in a grocery store. And I might have a real job!! Yay! Niamh needs money. Lots of money. At least 466 dollars a month. And even though a job would mean less writing, it would mean much needed money!!**

**Ok. Tangent over. Let's get to the ficage! This might be a little confusing, because it's six days after the last chapter. That means it's been a grand total of 13 days since Lavi said those words in the graveyard that night when they found Ursa. Follow?**

**Warnings: Boys lovin' each other. A thoughtful, slightly sarcastic Kanda. Lavi winkling out of his mind.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own D. Gray-man. But the moment the next chapter comes out on the 9****th****… well, 10****th**** or so for translation… I WILL be reading it. 'Sides, if I did… Tim would suddenly vanish and reappear magically like he does in my fics. And have a massive form that could take out Komu-Lens!**

**-- -- --**

Part Twenty-Two: Separation and Fairness

It had been fourteen days since Lavi had been close enough to Kanda naked to touch him. The night of the battle, a week for Allen to recover, and then six days of awkward, awkward half-silence between him and Kanda. Mostly it was his own fault, being Bookman hovered over him like an old balding cloud, narrowing his eyes and puckering his lips and generally scowling at the back of Lavi's head at every possible occasion. It was as if the old man wanted to directly interfere – but instead of outright reprimanding his apprentice for the stupid things he had done, Bookman let the redhead stew in his own juices. Even when Lavi and Kanda ate lunch together the most the redhead got out of it was an insult and the brush of a foot against his leg, a promise that things hadn't been forgotten.

Passing each other in the hall Lavi would reach out and momentarily touch Kanda's hand, or brush a bit more closely in a crowd than was absolutely necessary. The samurai returned the gestures, though less often, and would sometimes close his eyes to the brush of Lavi's skin against his knuckles, as if imagining it somewhere else.

All the same, Lavi was more than surprised when Kanda left his napkin behind at the lunch table, a very well hidden note scrawled crookedly on the inside of it.

_This needs to stop.  
My room. Tonight. 9:30.  
Either tell him or don't.  
I don't care.  
I just want to see you.  
Come up with a reason._

He quickly crumpled the little note and placed it in the middle of his plate and stood. It didn't matter that Bookman wasn't done, he wasn't going to wait for the old man. He had done enough waiting. _Kanda_ had done enough waiting.

Ignoring Bookman, Lavi made his way to the door, and looked both ways, then started after Kanda, who turned a corner in the direction of Komui's office. Maybe that's where he was going. Maybe the scientist had called him. Maybe it was something else entirely and he was just moving away from the footsteps behind him, intent on escape.

Whatever the case, a hand caught the redhead by the collar and yanked him into a lesser used hallway at the next corner, then dragged him down a flight of stairs and into the start of the catacombs. He went with it only because he knew it was Kanda's hand on his sweater and not someone else's, the familiar scent of soap clinging to the older boy like a sort of blanket that laid over his hair. Lavi almost buried his face in it when they stopped – almost. Would have. But he was smashed against a wall with an arm under his throat and a face he could hardly see directly in front of his, eyes narrowed and dangerous and angry.

He swallowed. There wasn't a whole lot more to do beside reach out and, shaking, lay his palms on Kanda's repaired coat.

"What happened to making two weeks feel like forever, _Baka_." Kanda didn't lift his voice in a question, he only leaned closer, so his breath parted across Lavi's lips. A hand touched the apprentice Bookman's left hip and the older man stepped into him, pressing them flush. It was as close as they had been in what felt like forever. "You haven't talked to the old man have you? You haven't done anything. Are you just waiting for me to go on a mission so you can do it while I'm not here?" He rocked forward, driving a soft line of air from Lavi's lips. "Because Komui offered me one for _tomorrow_ if you want me to take it, _usagi_—_"_

"What—no!" Lavi fisted his hands on the Japanese man's coat and pulled him closer, speaking in a very low voice. He felt painfully far away from the other man, like their clothes were too thick between them. The material in his hands felt rough and heavy, the air against his face warm and slightly scented like tea, and the form under his fingers felt painfully solid, exactly as he had imagined so many times in the last few days. "I just… he knows, I just haven't told him what… exactly…" Lavi paused, overcome with the trembling in his limbs and the pounding in his heart. It was a new emotion this time, one he had yet to know, but it came bottled up with love and guilt and fear like some kind of package that he didn't understand how to unwrap. "Yuu-chan…"

The samurai kissed him, deeply, ignoring the little sound of protest in the back of the redhead's throat.

Lavi knew he should have pushed him away, knew he should have explained better, but it was too _good_, too _pleasant_ to have Kanda's mouth against his, after so long without him. There was nothing else for it. His chest felt tight. Heat burned in his cheeks and flamed in his stomach, and he tightened his hands, an ill strangled moan in his throat. It didn't matter if this was only a kiss in a very dark hallway and nothing else, it was something between them.

When the contact broke Lavi whined softly, and pressed his open mouth to the turn of Kanda's jaw, breathing in his scent. His fingers wandered in the samurai's hair, pulling him upward. "I'm sorry," Lavi breathed, pulling Kanda closer. "I'll tell him that I love you before I go or something. Just… _God_ I missed you…"

"You smell like newsprint."

"Not like ink?"

"No, the paper," Kanda growled, kissing at the turn of Lavi's chin. "You taste like ink."

The redhead shivered. "So I take it you're not that mad at me?"

The Japanese man pulled back, eyes narrowed. "I'm fucking pissed at you, but that doesn't mean I don't want you. I don't know if I should beat you into a bloody pulp or…" He closed his teeth on the juncture of Lavi's shoulder and throat, over a faded bite mark, hard enough to bruise. Kanda didn't seem to care about how Lavi leaned away and thumped his head on the marble wall, eye pressed shut.

"I'll come tonight. I _swear_ I'll come. Even if I have to tie Bookman up so I can come see you, I'll find away." Lavi promised, pulling the samurai so close he could feel his heartbeat pushing against the other man's chest. "I've missed you so much… you feel so good… Yuu…" His lips brushed skin and the overwhelming urge to be naked with the other man brought a little whimper to his lips.

"Good to know I'm not the only one starving."

"Please tell me you don't hear anyone coming…"

"Che. I don't care if there is," Kanda corrected, and pressed his mouth hungrily to Lavi's again, deeper and harder than before. His hands roamed freely over Lavi's chest, into his sweater, down the arch of his back. The samurai's fingers snaked under the redhead's shirt and over his spine, leaving a line of short scratches in their wake, forming a pattern on his skin. Kanda knew what he was doing, what he could do, and the movement of his mouth let Lavi know that, even if Bookman was coming, or if Leverrier might turn the corner at any moment, the Japanese man was prepared to have him here and now if he allowed it.

Lavi moved his hands to the solid expanse of Kanda's chest before curling his arms around the back of his lover's shoulders, under his coat, and dragging him into a near crushing embrace. The press of a knee to the inside of his thighs brought a gasp to the apprentice Bookman's lips and he shivered, breaking away from the kiss.

"Yuu—"

"_Rabi, urusei."_

"I _need_ you…"

"I know."

But Kanda couldn't know. There was no way for Kanda to understand just how much it meant to be standing there, so close, after two weeks apart. There was no way the man could understand what it was like to not care for anything, fall in love, ignore that love, and finally feel it in this moment. No one could understand that. But Lavi didn't care if Kanda thought he understood, as long as he could continue to smell the soap in his lover's hair and taste what remained of the soba on his lips, he would be perfectly content not to correct him.

Lavi opened his mouth to say something, anything, to beg, to plead, to suggest they go somewhere, but different words escaped than intended, very soft and yet just as damning as they had been the very first time they had fallen from his lips. "I love you," he whispered, and now that he had said it once, he didn't think he could stop. "Make love to me, please. I need you… I want to be—"

Kanda cut him off with a sound that could have been a growl. _"Rabi… Bukkuman… nani ga…_ fucking…" The samurai growled as if that would set the language circuits in his brain into working order. "What did Bookman say?" He finally breathed against the redhead's chin.

"That I can't love you. That I'm a failure and I can't see you until I've proved myself indifferent to your existence."

"_Kusojiji."_

Lavi groaned softly and his knees buckled, but it didn't help at all to let himself slide down the wall a little. Everything – Kanda's mouth on his skin, the thought of discovery, flesh pressing to his back, hair playing across the ridge of his jaw while his lover's mouth changed angle – was too close and yet so _very_ far away. Something was wrong, painfully wrong with him, and the stabbing emotional pain in his chest only made it more obvious to him. A new emotion, this one _bad_ clenched his stomach and curled his fingers into his lover's skin, biting at the shoulders under Kanda's shirt. Another shiver took him, this one from the inside, and the redhead felt his legs threaten to give out again, the dark hall no assistance in keeping him focused whatsoever.

Kanda made a questioning sound that Lavi couldn't answer. It was too much, that cold empty feeling in his gut. It threatened to drown the fiery joy in his chest in a cold, dark, hollow wash of something uncomfortably tight and _wrong_.

A soft negative parted the apprentice Bookman's lips.

"What?" Kanda growled at him, wet lips formed the words against his neck, uncomfortably loud.

Lavi liked the physical sensations, and yet that feeling fell a little more deeply into his stomach, pulling his awareness with it. "I don't know… but I…" He fisted his hands on Kanda's jacket and pushed the samurai away a bit, breathing deeply, something he recognized as _panic_ twisting in his gut. Over the last week at the Order, things hadn't been as bad as that – he had felt around everyone to some extent, but he had been able to push the emotions away from himself, if not behind the broken barrier he no longer had readily available. Kanda was different though. Every moment he spent in the Japanese boy's presence was a moment of unequivocal feeling, so intense it usually left him sleepless on the nights Kanda had made eyes at him in the hall. But now…

"Lavi?"

The redhead noted worry in the dark haired man's voice and took a moment to access himself, just for a moment. He was shaking, breathing rapidly, ready to fall over. The touch of warm palms on his cheeks turned his face to the samurai, whose dark eyes he met with gut clenching uncertainty.

"What's wrong with you?"

Lavi opened his mouth to say something, anything, and instead crumbled, leaning into the smaller man for all of his support. To his slight surprise, Kanda didn't drop him and walk away, he instead guided them both downward, until Lavi rested against the wall and Kanda sat between his knees. There were hands on the redhead's body still, feeling his skin, but he couldn't think about them, he could only think about the twisting snake of ice in his gut.

Kanda's right hand tilted his head enough to meet the dark haired man's gaze again, but he couldn't say that he really saw it. "Lavi?"

"No…" The redhead shook his head and pressed his hands to his stomach. "Lavi wouldn't feel like this. Lavi wouldn't—"

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

The apprentice Bookman reached out and pressed his right hand to Kanda's chest, covering the tassel on his coat. It had bothered him before and the familiar act was soothing. But it didn't help. That nameless emotion was still gathered in his abdomen, searing him to the core, but he didn't have a core. He was a lot like Lavi, but Lavi wouldn't have felt that, so he couldn't _be_ Lavi. He should have known before that he hadn't been Lavi, even if he _was_ Lavi, even when he had started to forget how to be anyone else. But now was different. This didn't work with _Lavi_ anymore than it worked with being _Deak._

"I want… but… who…" He looked at the man in front of him and felt his fingers tighten on Kanda's coat. The fabric made a soft hissing sound under his fingernails. "I thought I was Lavi," he explained apologetically. The face in front of him frowned.

"You are Lavi."

The redhead shook his head emphatically. "Lavi can't feel this, Lavi is frivolous and friendly. Even if I just stopped keeping the persona separate, I should just… be him anyway. Only really feeling." His hand was so tight now that it was starting to cramp. "He wouldn't feel… like this because it's not in Lavi's personality to. He'd talk himself into feeling something else." He frowned deeper and his eye suddenly went blurry, though he couldn't say why. "So… if I'm not… Lavi then… who am I, Yuu? I don't know anyone of me that should feel _guilty_ enough to make me stop kissing you."

The samurai shifted back only to move forward again, very close to the redhead, still touching his shoulders. Wordlessly, because he did not know what to say, he pulled the man he only knew as Lavi away from the wall and against his chest, cradling him. Kanda was awkward in this sort of situation, whoever Lavi now was knew, but he was good at it if he tried anyway.

"You're still Lavi," Kanda breathed into the apprentice Bookman's scalp. "You'll always be Lavi."

"Yuu…"

"You've just changed," Kanda went on softly. His callused hands slid across the redhead's sweater, smoothing it down his frame. "All people change. Fuck, I'm _soothing_ you in a Goddamn hallway, I'm not the _'Yuu-chan'_ I was before I started… liking you."

The younger Exorcist chuckled and moved his arms around the Japanese man's neck, pulling him down into a very strange, and yet comfortable embrace. They fit like that, when Kanda's arms snaked low on his ribcage and his own legs wrapped around the samurai's waist, forming something of a full body hug. It surprised him a bit that the Japanese man would allow such intimacy where they might be caught, but it had been a long time since they had been so close, since they had smelled each other, since they had touched. The apprentice Bookman took that idea, the concept of their closeness, and tucked it next to his heart – because he had one – for safe keeping, incase he ever had to wonder who he was. The name wasn't important, not in the end.

With his face pressed to the side of Kanda's throat and his eye closed, Lavi felt that even if he wanted the other man, he did not need to give up this moment to show his desire.

Kanda agreed with him through a simple lack of movement.

"Lavi?

"Hm?"

"Che."

It was their only exchange for what felt like a small, warm eternity. No one came down their hallway, not a Finder and not Bookman, of which Lavi was glad. It was just the two of them huddled in the darkness, and Kanda's hands pressed to the skin at the small of his back. The samurai did not pull away or shift, but his breathing evened out until Lavi could time it without thinking about it, gradual and paced. Kanda's grip became loose and he slumped into the redhead, almost pinning him between the wall and his chest, forehead to the larger man's shoulder. His ponytail laid itself limply over his shoulder and settled on the redhead's, very lightly.

When he spoke, his whisper nearly cracked it was so quiet. "Spend the night with me," Kanda's fingers tightened on Lavi's back before releasing again. "I want you but I also want… I want…" He made an urgent little sound in the back of his throat and then growled, perhaps angry with himself. The vocalization was low and nearly silent but Lavi heard it all the same. "It's been two weeks since…" But that didn't seem to be what he wanted to say and so it tapered away too, until he was just sitting in silence, warm face on Lavi's throat.

"I'll sneak out when Panda hits the sack about nine." Lavi mumbled, a sigh in his throat. "But I think I'm gonna take a nap on you right now, if you don't mind. I haven't been sleepin' s'well since I haven't been sleepin' next t'you…" The redhead whispered into the dark haired man, his arms somewhat slack so that Kanda held about as much of his weight as he held of Kanda's. It made him feel tired. "You mind?"

Kanda made a negative grunt. "Let's find a bed."

"Really?"

"Che. No. I'm kidding. Yes, really."

Lavi felt his face lift into a genuine smile. "I can't stay long, Bookman will want to know where I went," he reminded, but he couldn't make himself stop grinning anyway. Twenty minutes, an hour, four, he would take what he could get with Kanda, because he wanted it, regardless of the guilt. Bookman would understand. It wasn't as if the old man hadn't fallen off the wagon before – or didn't every time Lavi nearly killed himself in the line of duty. "How tired are you? I could sleep for a week."

Kanda pulled him upward, still terribly close, and breathed in a short catching breath that didn't quite qualify as a gasp. His hands slipped low on Lavi's back, tilting them together. "I think I'll last ten minutes before I start…"

The redhead chuckled. In a rush he kissed the shorter man, hard, only to pause when the samurai took the more passive role in the act, almost teasing. Lavi did not stop completely, however, and turned them enough with his weight until the Japanese Exorcist was pressed to the wall in his place. A sound escaped Kanda, encouraging, and Lavi ran a palm up the inside of Kanda's shirt, tweaking a nipple as he went.

The shiver that took Kanda's shoulders was so forceful, Lavi moaned in sympathy.

"Maybe a nap is a bad idea." The redhead mumbled, and found his teeth pressed to the skin of Kanda's throat, fingernails grazing down his spine. He couldn't get enough of Kanda, wouldn't get enough of Kanda, not when the long haired man was letting him have free reign like this, though the touches were returned when he needed to breathe. "We should… if we don't – Yuu…" With a groan he met the slight motion of the smaller man's hips and gasped softly, desperately against Kanda's open mouth. "We can't—"

"I hate you," Kanda's voice was little more than a breeze on Lavi's lips. "When you're right." Yet his hands continued to roam over Lavi's body, his breathing hissing in quick, short pants, loud and needy. It seemed that the Japanese man was just as wanton as the redhead was, though the feeling was buried beneath his movements most of the time. "Stay away from me until you come tonight. I don't want to have to drag you into a bathroom or under a pew when Bookman's not looking." He growled, and tried – really made an effort – to push Lavi away from him.

The redhead was not so willing to part. "I'm gonna smell like you now…"

"So?"

"I guess I'll claim that I felt really dirty and needed a shower…" Lavi whispered, a soft snicker on his lips. He pulled back enough to smirk at Kanda only to find himself unable, the Japanese man's face pressed to his neck, leaving butterfly kisses on his skin. "A cold shower. Wouldn't really be a lie either… you've already got me more'n half hard just kiss—"

"Che. Don't say unnecessary things." Kanda broke in softly.

Lavi smiled. "Yeah, cultural differences, blah, blah. How long've you been here not to be used to dirty talk?" Though they were close to parting now, he leaned forward again until his lips grazed Kanda's left earlobe, and dropped his voice. "It doesn't even strike you as the least bit kinky when I say something like… how much I want you inside of me?"

"_Lavi!"_ Kanda's voice sounded entirely too flustered to be his own.

Lavi nipped at his ear. "I do though… maybe that means I'm… your lover now, aren't I?"

"Don't even think to use such a stupid word."

"What then?" The redhead pressed, licking the place he had nipped. "Am I your boyfriend?"

Kanda made a soft disgruntled sound and pushed his leg forward, guiding it between Lavi's knees. "You're a moron," he hardly managed. There was a long pause, or maybe it was short and the pressure of his leg upward just made it seem longer than it was. "Moron."

Lavi pulled back but moved his hands to cup Kanda's face and pull him away from the wall, kissing him one long, deep, final time before he had to go. And he really had to go now. He didn't know how long they had been here, how long Bookman would give before he came to look for him, but he knew their actions would be unforgivable. The velvet of Kanda's tongue against his and the press of callused fingers to his throat did not make understanding any easier. How would he explain it to Bookman? He'd told the old man everything – from Kanda's first kiss to wanting to trade Allen for oil to realizing just how much he felt for the dark haired man – and had been kicked for it more than once. His right hand still hurt from copying old, dark, very depressing logs for six days. But none of it mattered. How did he explain that he'd rewrite every book in the library if it meant staying with Yuu-chan for even a day?

He pulled back sharply, a stabbing pain searing through his chest. Love hurt more now than it had when he hadn't known that it was there. But he didn't care. The pain just made the sensation more real.

"I'll be there by nine thirty, I promise."

"If you're not, I'm killing Bookman."

-- -- --

The town had fallen into winter. Allen watched, sitting up and yet crooked, as Link came in and dusted the snow from his hair and his shoulders, kicking his boots so the clumped up flakes in their soles splattered on the white floor. Allen didn't mind the Assistant Inspector so much now, especially since the last six days after Kanda, Lavi, and Ursa had gone off back Home. The blond was friendlier somehow. He still didn't smile or laugh or even pretend to like his charge as anything more than a less-than-undesirable child, but he _did_ give Allen more space. And sometimes poured him water without having to be asked.

One irritating thing was that Link had begun to ensure he always had an ample supply of broccoli with every meal and wouldn't leave him alone about it until it was eaten. The British Exorcist didn't dislike the vegetable, but it wasn't the most delicious way to get calcium and fiber in his opinion – it was boring and gave him flatulence he could not lie his way out of. It was embarrassing.

The blond man gave him little more than a head tilt of acknowledgement before shucking off his coat and hanging it over his left arm, a deep scowl on his somewhat unpleasant features.

"What did Lenalee say?" Allen asked as brightly as he could while speaking at little more than half of his usual volume. The deep breaths required to say things loudly generally made every bone in his body scream with pain – which wasn't so bad considering everything he had gone through in his short, sad little life. Link showed a little more pity when he was quiet, too.

"The same as the others," Link sighed and ran a hand down the wet length of his braid, scowling a little at the melted snow there, making his fingers cold. "Six towns without a single corpse in any of them since that Akuma's appearance."

"And all of them within thirty miles of this one," Allen echoed the sigh, which narrowed his eyes a bit from the little stab of pain it caused. He bent his black left hand up and touched the middle of his chest a bit, feeling it expand and contract as he took another breath, slower this time. "I didn't know Akuma could have that kind of range… unless he – it – went to those places before it came here…" He tapered of and moved his left hand from his chest to his left eye. The right was no longer bandaged, so covering it no longer blinded him to the room like it had a few days before.

It hadn't showed him that Mörder was an Akuma that day in the inn. And he hadn't had the urge to use it since the night it had. What if it was changing again? What if it was growing? _Evolving_ like an Akuma again?

_What will happen if you don't show me something and someone is hurt because of it?_

The end of his bed sank down as Link sat on it, looking at him with his strange eyebrows pushed up toward the dots in the center of his forehead. It was one of those rare occasions – which were growing more common by the day – when the blond man seemed _friendly_ and less concerned with the thoughts of the Pope and Leverrier. Allen liked the moments he was like this because – somehow – it made him feel less like he was being babysat and more like he was being helped by having the Assistant Inspector there, as if Link was a failsafe rather than an assassin in a clergyman's clothing.

Link never asked what it was that bothered the British boy. He just made that face that told Allen he could talk.

"I'm worried that the curse is changing…" Allen mumbled, and moved his hand down enough to stare at his palm, "Because it didn't show me the Akuma when I was in the same room with him. It didn't react at all." He let his eyes wander upward, but stopped at Link's mid chest, worried what he would see if he met the man's eyes. "My first mission… with Kanda, when an akuma disguised itself as Toma – a Finder – there was a delay. I was so worried about Toma that I didn't notice the Akuma until it was too late." His eyes flicked down again, suddenly very strange feeling. He swallowed thickly. "I don't think anything like that has happened since then… I've always…" He shook his head and let both of his eyes fall shut. "I wish I could ask someone why it didn't work." He said at last, getting to the point of things. "It should have… worked…"

Link, who had been woken by Allen's eye on more than one occasion, almost managed to look sympathetic. "Have you tried to activate it?"

Allen shook his head, sending his white hair dancing across his cheeks. "I want Komui to look at it first," he admitted in a soft voice. "If it gets hungry though it might…"

He looked up at the shifting of Link's weight and found himself slightly surprised when the older man smiled softly at him, the way he did when he was about to say something Leverrier wouldn't agree with outright. The Assistant Inspector was a rule abiding man, but he had been in the thick of it, had suffered at the hands of an Akuma before, and understood a fraction of what Exorcists faced on a day to day basis. It was a bit nice, really. "I'm sure the Supervisor will tell you what's going on with it, Walker. Try not to worry yourself about it." He nodded a little, and even if his expression wasn't that bright, it was better than his old stoic face of indifference.

"Thanks, Link."

-- -- --

Kanda was going to have an aneurysm and he was going to die. That or he was going to run out of ideas and just have to take a shower early, even though that kind of defeated the purpose of taking one anyway, not that it had seemed to matter when he hadn't taken one last time. And there were so many other things to think about besides the fact that Lavi was most likely still naked in the closest shower to his room, dealing with his issues.

The Japanese man scowled into his closet, looking at his favorite sweater and there – behind it – the yukata he had been wearing every so often as a bathrobe just because he liked it. It was pale blue rough cloth, with a very simple, unprinted design on it, with a yellowed white liner. Coming to the Order at ten made his memories a little vague sometimes, in terms of what was culturally his and what was something he had read in a book trying to piece together the things he remembered. The yukata helped. He couldn't remember a lot of people in them, but there was one woman who stood out in his mind in a pink one, with a thick red sash and little wooden sandals.

That woman had taught him a lot of things about being a good child and only saying things that were proper and how to hold his chopsticks. But all the same, he couldn't actually remember if she had been his mother.

Shrugging off the memory he reached inside and touched the fabric, thinking that it might have been strangely spun silk or some kind of material from his very distant, very likely demolished home.

It felt right to pull the yukata out of the closet and pull it off the hanger. For all he knew it was supposed to be folded – no one had ever taught him how to store one, only how to tie it back up again if he had to use the bathroom – but that didn't matter. He laid it out on his bed. After six days of thinking about it, four of which he spent trying to pin Lavi in a corner thinking he was being avoided, this seemed like the right thing to do, the right garment to wear. It wasn't a wedding dress. He didn't _want_ a wedding dress. But it would send the message he wanted to send if he had to wear it half open to get it through the idiot's head.

He wanted things to be fair.

Muttering to himself about how this wasn't humiliating and it didn't matter, it would happen eventually, he was just speeding along the process, he picked out a pair of soft white boxers and a black hair tie. That finished it, being he knew where his socks were and the last piece of the yukata was kept right beside them. He swallowed hard as he looked at the ensemble together, scowling at it.

After their meeting in the hall, Kanda knew that he wanted this, even if he only wanted it once. Which was, to him, a bit stupid.

"Che." He reached up in a desire to rake his hands through his hair but stopped himself remembering that it was in a tight pony. This was all so stupid. So corny. So _womanly_ and yet he wanted to do it. And Lenalee wasn't around to tell him that it was fine and he and Lavi were together and they could be _happy_ if they wanted to be. She was good at this sort of thing – and pretty good at making him feel ok with it, too.

He decided to leave his things as they were and go _do_ something. Train alone, being Lavi wasn't an option, Chaoji and Marie were off on a mission, and Miranda was pretty much pointless. That Ursa girl was most likely being forced to sync better – being she apparently sucked at it – so it was either train alone, or meditate on the thought that Lavi was likely naked in the nearest shower _right now_, naked, rubbing soap all over his body, _alone and naked_.

Kanda cursed and sank down on his bed next to his clothes. Lavi naked. He didn't need to think about that. He didn't need to think about the redhead's stupid smile and bright eye, his smell, his taste, his _hands_. The Japanese man leaned back until he was looking up at the ceiling of his room, the familiar ceiling, with his feet hanging over the side of the mattress, bent at the knee. He closed his eyes. The redhead's hips, his shoulders, the indent of his spine, the lines of his legs from the curves of his hips, and his stupid blush – Kanda could imagine it all. The image didn't have to be sexual, even if Lavi was naked in his mind. They could just be close that way. Or asleep. Or wrapped up in a blanket in the dead of winter, sharing warmth and tea, silent but for the wind whipping the snow and the crackle of a nearby flame.

That idea he could go with.

He didn't have a very vivid imagination. He could calculate angles and trajectories without numbers, could estimate the size of a room, but he never put details into his own mental images beyond what was needed to know what he was thinking. For that reason he mind was filled with a vague dark room, with a couch they weren't sitting on, and a rug, a blanket draped around both of them. The color of the blanket wasn't important so he didn't give it one. Instead he filled in the details of a brick fireplace, open, and the large, square window to their right, he imagined Lavi's form, his body, his smile. Tea cups. Green tea. The scent of old books and cold.

It didn't matter how it started or why they were naked or who put what where. It was just perfect because it was the two of them. Hands in his hair, Lavi tilting his head back to gasp, nothing between them, his mouth on Lavi's chest, watching the fire—

Someone knocked on the door.

With every curse he knew flitting through his mind on overdrive, Kanda turned on his side to ignore the intrusion. His little… daydream – it was _not_ a fantasy – was more important than whoever it was or whatever they wanted.

"What?!" He growled in annoyance at a second knock, curling his lip back from his teeth as he turned toward the door, half-prepared to cut it from its hinges but that then it wouldn't properly close.

The voice from the other side was shaking and feminine when it answered. "Komui-san wants to see you, Kanda-kun."

-- -- --

The redhead was going to die. The warm water flowing down his shoulders, wetting his hair and sliding down his bare chest was soothing, as was the press of the cool tile to his forehead, but it wasn't enough. Lavi had opted for a shower rather than a bath for any number of reasons – including the fact that if anyone was in the bath at the moment, there weren't divisions like there were in the showers. Sure, the divisions were small and short and left little to mystery, but no one could watch his hands from behind one. And fewer people were likely to ask him why he had been standing under the hot water for twenty minutes without doing more than wash his hair.

He was dying, slowly, being sucked away by some other part of himself. Things hadn't been bad until he ran into Yuu again in the hall, and all of that kissing, touching, holding each other…

Love swelled in his chest and he bit his lower lip. Guilt followed. But then the love answered again and the guilt grew angry and he started to get confused – he wanted to give things up for Yuu, he wanted to be who he was forever, if only so he could be with Yuu. But that left Bookman alone, and he was old. Bookman most likely didn't have twenty more years to dump into an apprentice that could fail just like Lavi – or whoever – was now. That wasn't fair.

But life wasn't fair. Bookman wasn't fair. And when he'd made this choice, he'd only been a child.

With a growl the redhead turned his face up to the nozzle and increased the heat, letting it pour over his flesh so that it almost hurt, to keep him in the moment. He felt a bit dizzy, but didn't worry himself over it. At the worst he'd just switch it to cold and that would be it.

Instead he worried about Yuu. He'd go tonight, there was no way he was going to stay away, but what would happen if Bookman tried to stop him?

_Lavi_ would want to cower in fear and go back to sleep. _Lavi_ would apologize and take the beating the old man had to offer. But _he_ wouldn't. _He_ wouldn't be separated from Yuu-chan for any reason on Earth tonight, it had been too long to let Bookman drag him away for some stupid, unfeeling reason. And it would be stupid. After six days of no physical contact, things should have gone back to normal in his head, should have cleared up and divided like they always had around girls – but he hadn't slept with the girls, fantasized about the girls (as much), or held his breath so Bookman couldn't hear him moaning their names at night. He had just stop thinking about them. He had stopped feeling for them, if he felt anything at all, which had been stupid considering how he _felt_ now.

He couldn't stop _feeling_ about Yuu. He didn't want to.

He didn't know he was shaking until his right hand hit the tile in front of him, not hard enough to crack it but hard enough to make his knuckles sore. He looked down at it, at the fingers that he had always had and the back that had been there for every one of his selves, and felt strangely unable to connect with it. It wasn't _his_. It had only been his when it wasn't someone else's.

He _really_ wasn't Lavi.

"_Oh…fuck…"_ The words seeped from his lips and he turned, leaning against the wall and sliding down it until his legs gathered in an awkward lump under his weight, the searing hot water beating down on him like a battering ram. If he wasn't Lavi, who was he? The name worked, sure, but what about everything else? He still felt _friendly_, but not exactly _frivolous_, and there were a grand total of seven people he knew within him that were _friendly_ at all. But he wasn't any of them. And there was _no way_ he was Bookman Junior and feeling anything at all, because that couldn't happen. But beyond that – beyond what personality applied – there was an eerie sense that whoever he was _felt_.

Another curse came out of his mouth and he drew his legs up to him, folding his arms around them. It wouldn't be hard to fool everyone into thinking he was _Lavi_ because _Lavi_ was easy. Bookman would figure it out though. And he wouldn't want to lie to Yuu about it. Though, he realized with a frown, it was rather unlikely that Yuu would understand it completely, being he hadn't seen _Lavi_ in the Ark. But that was ok, too. If Yuu just saw it as a new side, a deeper connection, things would be easier.

Because whoever Lavi was now still loved Yuu.

An idea struck him, randomly, having nothing to do with his prior thoughts and went with it, jerking his head back almost hard enough to hit the wall. He didn't notice. Instead he opened his mouth, speaking in a very quiet voice.

"My name is…" He let it linger when nothing came to mind, dying in the sound of running water. "I'm called…" He said after a moment, more softly. Still nothing. "I'm…"

It went on for some time, and he grew quieter with each failed attempt. By the time he was silent again, however, there was a little smile on his lips and he ran his fingers over the wet material of his eye-patch, grinning.

"Panda's gonna kill me…whoever I am…"

-- -- --

Kanda did his very best not to take out his pent up feelings on Miranda, it wasn't like she'd understand anyway. The Finders though, now those he could glare into the floor without feeling too bad about it. They made their way down hall at a brisk pace, mostly because Kanda wanted this over with, it didn't matter what Komui wanted, or how dire the mission seemed, he wasn't taking the one for tomorrow unless he had to. It had only been six days since they'd been back, they still had eight more to rest. That was how things worked, unless otherwise requested. Kanda had not made that sort of request this time.

And yet he somehow felt that he was walking to his doom all the same.

The lights dimmed as they neared the heart of the Order, and then brightened again when they came into the main science wing, which was filled with whirring and buzzing and strange chemical smells overpowered by ink and coffee. Komui wasn't down the short hall in his private office – instead he was standing over Reever's shoulder, watching him work with what looked like a severed hand.

Things were looking great already.

Komui didn't smile and didn't greet him, which was odd, he just waved his hand toward one of the unoccupied back tables and then walked to it, inviting him over. The papers and quills and pencils that littered the top of it made it more than obvious that this, at the moment, was Komui's desk for paperwork – Bridget had most likely kicked him out in order to organize his office.

The head scientist took out a piece of paper first and slid it across the table – Kanda scowled at it. Did the guy live to pick apart mission reports nowadays or what? He looked down at the margins, where he had repeatedly… produced (he did not _doodle_) little gray replica's of Lavi's hips, the shadow of his eye patch, and the turn of his lips and jaw. None of them were connected so it wasn't obvious what he had been ruminating on at the time he had done them.

"I was supposed to check up on you and Lavi," Komui said brightly, smiling for the first time.

Kanda felt his heart clench in his chest but kept his face emotionless. "Why?"

The Supervisor cocked an eyebrow slightly – as if Kanda was being stupid. "Lenalee asked me to. I've heard that the two of you have been sort of avoiding each other recently, but that he followed you out of the cafeteria at lunch and then you both vanished." He paused then, looking at Kanda's very surprised expression with one of equal nonchalance. "I had Jerry keep an eye out on you. Now tell me," his hands folded over his desk, and he sank down into a chair. "Is there something I should be worried about? Or can I schedule you both for the mission tomorrow?"

The younger man felt his jaw tighten. He didn't want a mission. Lavi wouldn't want a mission. But together… "Che. I don't… know… if we'll want to… go." Kanda bit out slowly. Stupid emotions were making things annoying. Yes, it sounded nice to spend the day curled up with Lavi tomorrow after _tonight_ but realistically... "What about Bookman?"

Komui's eyebrows furrowed. "Oh. He has Bookman business in India, and can't be made to take any missions until he returns. He's letting us keep Lavi, however. Are you two fighting or—"

"We're not fighting." Kanda's voice was unusually quiet, his eyes suddenly turned away from Komui's – the hands he normally kept crossed over his chest hanging down his sides in fists. He didn't want to talk about this with Komui, didn't want to dig himself _another_ whole on top of all the others. If the Vatican knew about the mark on his chest and his ideas on their _God-given_ quest to save the world, he was screwed enough. Adding _Sodomite _to the list would likely put him on par with Allen Walker. "We're just… having a…"

"Lover's quarrel?"

Kanda pretended – badly – to look disgusted. "Che. Who do you think I am? Moyashi?"

Komui smiled at him, knowingly, and propped his chin on his hands, perfectly in line with one of Kanda's white knuckled fists. "No, I know you're Kanda. What are you having then?" The Chinese man's stupid face was far too easy going, far too _nice,_ and just a little too _knowing_. It was like his face had turned into a target or something, all wide eyed and smiling.

"Were having. It's over now. We're fine."

"Did you say _we_, Kanda?"

"Does it matter?"

"Not particularly. I'll tell Lenalee the two of you are back to being _friends_ again as soon as she calls."

_Friends_. In the past, Kanda would have barked something about how he didn't have any friends, didn't need any friends, and Lavi could just die if he thought they were friends. Companions? No, he didn't have those either. But he couldn't lie about it this time, not with Komui smiling like he knew the truth. Lenalee wouldn't have told him – not on her life – but if he had seen or walked by or someone had told him about what had happened in that hallway, it would have been pretty damn obvious from the sounds and kissing and rubbing, Kanda figured.

He decided to take a risk. "What do you know?" He whispered, leaning down with eyes narrowed. "What are you thinking?"

Komui just smiled and leaned back, letting his fingers fall to the nearest quill. "I think I'll sign you both up, though you should be warned that it's likely the mission will last a bit, considering the circumstances. You see, it's a house that's eating people in the north of Ireland. Or that's the rumor. People and akuma go in, no one comes out. Only one Finder came back of the five we've sent and—"

"Don't fuck with me Komui, what do you know?!" Kanda said the words too loudly, and the nearest five people stopped working around them to stare. The samurai didn't care. He lowered his voice though, mostly to make it more dangerous sounding, though he doubted the scientist would know what that danger meant. "What, exactly, did Lenalee tell you?"

"Oh," Komui smiled all too widely. "Just that I should keep an eye on the two of you, for unspecified reasons. It just seems logical that the two of you might be having a tiff, being she didn't sound too concerned about it. Between your _drawings,_ which look oddly like Lavi's hips –I know, I _designed _his pants – and the two of you avoiding each other in the halls, _and_ Jerry pointing out that you were playing footsy… put one thing together with another it looks like—"

Kanda did the one thing that he had wanted to on a number of occasions but had never actually managed: he hauled off and punched Komui in the face.

He didn't understand his own actions, not really, but he understood the little sound Komui made as he hit the floor, and the absolute stillness to the room, as well as the scrape of Reever's chair sliding back from his desk. Kanda looked down at his hand, which hurt a little, before he turned his eyes to the man on the floor, laying in his toppled chair awkwardly, left hand pressed to his cheek. He had done that. Kanda had crossed the line between annoyed and angry without even noticing the trigger and lashed out without meaning to. It had just happened.

Before Reever could get to Komui's side, Kanda inched his way around the desk and offered Komui a hand, scowling at himself. "Sorry," he grumbled under his breath, as if the word was painful to eek through his lips. "I don't draw. Just… I'll tell you if we're going in the morning. We're both kind of…"

Komui nodded as he took Kanda's hand and helped to heave himself up, clutching at the glasses that had been forcibly migrated halfway down his chest. "Stressed, I can see that." He set the spectacles on his nose, blinking through his fingerprints. "Could you get me an icepack? After that you can go down into town if you want. Blow off some steam – without hurting anyone." Moving his head to the side showed a line of clear red knuckle prints on his cheekbone, marks that would likely leave a fairly swollen purple accessory to Komui's face in the not so distant future. At least, despite everything, he was taking it lightly. The last thing Kanda needed at the moment was a lecture or a punishment – he'd _apologized_ anyway.

"Che." Kanda shrugged at the taller man, still scowling. "Whatever," he turned on heel and, glaringly, stalked away toward the hall.

-- -- --

**You like still?**


	24. Distinctiveness and Farewells

**Hello everyone. I'm sleepy. And working on too many things at once. But alas, all good things must come to an end…**

**EVENTUALLY. ^^ Not yet.**

**Dark-chan! I know you didn't beta, but I haven't seen you in two days while this has been done! D8 I had to post it!**

**Disclaimer: I do not own D. Gray – Man. If I did… I think all of the characters would have midlife crisis. Like… a quarter way through their lives. Well, not 'Mui, he's old enough…**

**WARNINGS: Angst? Well… it's… sad? Boy's touching? A vague thing said by Lenalee that could have many implications? Maybe a HINT of het if you squint painfully so you can't see anymore? Question marks?**

**--**

Part Twenty-three: Distinctiveness and Farewells

Lavi – the name still applied really, even if it _wasn't _his – did everything he could to avoid Bookman, going exactly the places Lavi wouldn't want to go in the opposite order that he would have liked to go to them. He ended up in the very back of the library, next to the children's section, arms draped around a pillow, most of his body tucked under a couch so Bookman wouldn't find him right away. He didn't have a book with him, though he did have a piece of paper and a quill with a full inkwell, which he was making erratic use of. His right hand, ink-stained and aching, hardly wanted to move anymore, and the words came out hardly legible, slanted to the right in a style that wasn't, no matter how he looked at it, Lavi's.

He had written all forty-nine of the names that were his, at least five times each, in the order which he had been them. None of them felt like writing the name he wanted to be called by, none of them felt like _his_ name, but that hadn't been the point since the third or forth time through – after that, it was just going through familiar motions. None of the names worked, nor would they ever. But the scratch of quill on parchment, the smell of fresh ink, the play of the quill in the dark against his cheek – it was all soothing and familiar.

When he dotted the 'I' in Lavi for the sixth time, he stopped, having no more room, and frowned at his work. Against the dark wood of the floor the paper looked very white, and the strokes of the quill cuts in it, holes that showed the black beneath. Like a mask with expert eyeholes, or a well worn persona, bleeding parts of the original from beneath.

The quill made a very soft sound as he laid it across the paper and pulled his pillow so he could half lean on it, looking down at the list with his eye half-hooded. They weren't him. None of them were him. So who did that leave? No one. There weren't anymore options. There were just shreds of his former selves in his head, none of them with anchors to hold them in place, and a very keen sense of longing the likes of which he had never known.

It irked him a bit that not everything was coming back to Yuu.

He missed Allen. He wanted the British boy there to say something bratty or stupid to him, to bring back that friendly, protective part of him that helped to define _Lavi_. Because Lavi was a good person to be, Yuu liked and knew Lavi, and if he had to be stuck as any of the people he had been, that was most likely the one he wanted to be stuck as. Allen, since the Ark, had always made him surer of his _Lavi-_self, the way that Bookman made him surer of his status as _Bookman Junior._

But wishing the younger Exorcist was around didn't make it so.

He hugged his pillow tighter.

From Allen his mind went to Yuu, and how the dark haired man had told him to stay away until the appointed time of their meeting. The redhead really wanted to follow that request, didn't want to give the samurai another reason to run him through, but realistically it wouldn't be good to surprise him – not if it was avoidable. Yuu wouldn't like finding out that the guy he loved was crazy, but there really didn't seem to be a way around it. Not that having an identity crisis made the redhead _crazy_, just very, very confused.

His eye fell shut. It didn't matter anyway. He'd just throw away the paper and go back to his room and claim illness when Panda found him – which was more or less true. And the longer he held on to the pillow, the more he wanted to curl up and sleep, dream about one person in general. No matter which persona he was, he still had a photographic memory.

He pushed himself from under the couch and crumpled the paper in his hand, smearing his palm with the half-dried list of names in the process. He didn't care. Yuu hadn't seemed adverse to the flavor of ink on his skin before, and that would be about the only reason he could think of to avoid it, being it was practically unavoidable. Yuu's mouth on him – he didn't need to think about that right now.

The walk from his red and yellow couch to his room usually took about seven minutes – but at the pace he dragged himself, foot after foot, holding the crumpled ball of names to his stomach, it was likely to take him eleven or more. He didn't care. He gave weak smiles to the people who looked at him with concerned eyes and tried not to think about how very lost he was even if he knew where he was going, and the horrors that would befall him if Bookman ran into him at any point. He should have wanted Bookman, really, because Bookman could _fix_ this, but he didn't want to be fixed, he wanted…

"Lavi?" The voice sounded behind him just as he spotted his door, and he almost didn't respond to it – it worked just as well as any of the other forty-eight names, the only difference was it was what people knew him by. He turned very slowly to face Miranda, who – in an exceedingly bold act for her usual shy self – reached out and took him by the arm, guiding him toward his room. "Never mind, I'll tell Komui it can wait. You look terrible," the German woman said with a frown. Her large dark eyes were just as sunken as usual, her unruly hair lying around her face in large, sweeping curls. Her uniform made her look so proper and thin – it was hard to believe where she had come from.

Now that Lavi thought about it, she kind of looked like Ursa, with shorter hair, a taller frame, and continuous sleep deprivation – and a much narrower jaw.

"What's Komui want?" He managed to sound like was tired even though that really wasn't the case. It worked though, because Miranda frowned at him so deeply he almost felt bad for _her_ instead of himself. He was the one having the identity crisis though, so the feeling only last a short, confusing moment before it was gone.

She stopped as they reached his room. "Something about perhaps going on a mission tomorrow with Kanda. Kanda apparently wasn't very clear on if you'd both be up to it and he… he hit Komui for something, though neither of them will say what it was. I'll tell him you're under the weather, ok?" She gave one of her rare, wide smiles, and he smiled back, because the expression made him feel happy for her. She was pretty when she smiled.

"Thanks a bunch, Miranda," he said more softly than _Lavi_ would have, and squeezed the woman's arm very softly. "If you see Yuu-chan… tell him… never mind, I'll tell him tomorrow. But make sure he avoids Bookman. I don't wanna even think about who would win a fight between them." He threw in a very awkward little chuckle, and took the knob in his hand, intent on bidding Miranda farewell.

She stopped him, clasping her hands together and wringing them. "He… went down to the city – Komui's orders. If you need to talk about something Lavi, I can do my best to listen. I'm not Lenalee, but…" Her awkwardness, coupled with her smile, was all Lavi needed.

He hugged her – for the first time ever _really_ hugged her – and meant to press her slim frame against him, just because it was nice and close and soothing and human. She didn't respond for a moment, but laid her hands on his shoulders in that timid way that defined her and made him smile.

"Thanks, but I think I'll be ok. Unless…" He let her go and held her at arm's length, meeting her eyes. "You know, you might just be the perfect person to tell. C'mon, and lock the door behind you."

-- -- --

Lenalee was happy to find Allen sleeping on his back, with Link on the bed beside him reading a book that he didn't seem the slightest bit interested in. She forced herself to smile at the blond man, who inclined his head to her, before she settled herself on the edge of Allen's bed, which brought the British boy's eyes open. To her surprise he looked at her, grinned, and closed his eyes again, a little upward curve taking his lips.

"Allen," she whispered, and watched him lift his eyelids just enough to let the light glimmer from the wetness of his eyes. "How come you told Lavi that you couldn't use the Ark to get us Home?" Her fingers, which were very cold from being outside in the snow and wind, closed on his right hand, and refused to let it go when he turned it over, connecting their palms. It might have been a truly intimate bit of contact, except that Allen had never showed the barest interest in her, and she was just fine having a little brother to tease and care for in a slightly less overbearing way than Komui cared for her. "It's in your head, isn't it? You can just… think it?"

The British Exorcist glanced at his guard, who continued to read his book with forced interest. "I don't…" He whispered, turning his hand over on top of Lenalee's. "It _does_ help if I stand straight while I do it though, but… really… I don't want to use it for something unimportant like this. It was easier just to tell him I can't than to tell him I'd rather not." His fingers twitched when hers tightened on the back of his palm. "How'd you know?"

"You've never had to play it before."

Allen's eyes closed again and he sighed, looking a bit distraught. "I'm sorry I lied," he whispered, and seemed to wait for whatever pain she had in store for him now.

With a frown Lenalee leaned forward enough to wrap her arms around the white haired boy's shoulders in something of a half-horizontal hug. "You don't have to be sorry, but you don't have to lie either," she whispered, and felt him return the embrace in that gentle, naïve way that made her smile. "Just say that you don't want to do it next time, it's not like they'll order you to."

He nodded into her neck. "Hey, Lenalee…" His voice fell so much that she nearly didn't hear him go on. "Will you stay like this, just for a little while?"

She felt her smile widen and settled herself more comfortably, so his ribcage didn't have to take any of her weight. "Sure thing, Allen-kun."

-- -- --

The day went by much too slowly, dragging on in an endless line of glares and curses, each one meaner and deadlier than the last. Kanda found himself under the pouring hot water of a very relaxing shower at about eight thirty, hot water sticking his hair in a long, wet net down his back and across his shoulders, almost irritatingly heavy. The color contrasted rather strongly with the white tile walls, a little less so against the pale tan of his skin. He wondered if Lavi saw it that way – ebony and ivory, black on white – or if he only took in everything, all at once, at equal value, and labeled it as he saw. It was a strange thought for Kanda, he did not generally care what others thought or how they did, only that they kept their thoughts to themselves. But this one – how Lavi saw him – held his interest for a moment. If the redhead saw him here, under the steamy flow of water, with his hair newly washed and his skin prickling in the heat and cold, what would be the defining characteristic to draw the apprentice Bookman's eye?

Was a yukata _really_ what Lavi would want to see him in? Would he understand what it meant? Or would he want something more formal? Less formal? Would it even matter?

And _why_ did _Kanda_ _care_?

"Che… stupid feelings…" He closed his fingers on the ends of his hair, gritting his teeth. It wouldn't have been so bad accept that he couldn't _stop worrying_ about the little things. He hadn't even had much of a dinner because of it.

He didn't even hear the door come open.

It was not until he had his hand on the hot knob, turned off, that he heard anything, and that was the splash of a footfall behind him. He made to turn and do something violent, to hit whoever the hell thought they could sneak into his shower stall with him, but a pair of sweater-clad, strong arms wrapped around his middle and held him firm, a familiar scent in his nostrils. Lavi. With a blush and slightly less than graceful movements, Kanda turned to face the redhead, prying his grip just loose enough to make the movement possible.

The face that looked down at him was worry worn and tired, puffy-eyed, with ink smeared under the right, covered eye. Lavi wasn't smiling.

Kanda should have yelled at him, should have told Lavi to back up and go away – this wasn't the place for such things. Kanda should have hit the redhead idiot for touching him and stormed away.

He leaned up and kissed the apprentice Bookman, all too aware that his naked body brushed the material of Lavi's clothes in the process. The touch was slow, tender, and when Kanda opened his eyes to see Lavi's reaction to it, he found himself looking into an unfamiliar expression, the redhead's eye half-hooded and brimming with unshed tears.

"I tried to tell Miranda, but she couldn't figure it out," Lavi whispered, and his arms squeezed the Japanese man's wet frame against him, completely indifferent to the fact that someone might walk in at any moment. "The only person I have left is Bookman, and he might kill me so I—"

"What are you talking about?" Kanda hissed into the redhead's collar, ignoring the drip of his wet bangs into his eyes. It didn't matter at the moment, not with Lavi near tears right in front of him. "What's wrong?" His fingers dug into the redhead's shoulders and thrust him back, holding him away regardless of how hard the redhead tried to keep himself close, despite the desperate whimper in the back of his throat. "Talk to me, damn it!"

Lavi cringed. "You'll think I'm crazy!"

Kanda narrowed his eyes at the apprentice Bookman, anger flaring behind them. "You really think I don't get it? You really think I'd shrug off what's wrong with you as some mental problem? Fuck, Lavi…" He shook his head, sending strings of his wet hair dancing around his shoulders. "I _get_ that you've been who knows how many people, and I _get_ that _Lavi_ is just one of them, but I can't help you unless you tell me what's—"

"I don't know who I am anymore." The redhead cut him off in a whisper, the tears that had gathered in his eye spilling over the lower lid without warning. The apprentice Bookman didn't seem to notice. Instead he reeled backward, colliding with the little door that separated this shower from the main room. "I'm none of the people I've been. I'm not… how I was. And I feel everything. _Everything_. I love you, I miss Allen-chan, I hate… mean people… and I'd be ok with all of that, but I don't know who _I_ am and how much of me is…" Lavi stopped at the press of Kanda's fingers to his lips, tears still running unhindered down the left side of his face.

"Can Bookman fix this?"

Lavi shook his head. "I don't know… I've never heard of it happening before."

Kanda glanced at the door, just to be safe, before he leaned forward enough to kiss the redhead softly on the lips, then pulled away. "Che. You're still… you, right?" He became aware that Lavi was reaching for any and every part of him. The redhead wanted to touch, but that wasn't good here. Not where someone could walk in and notice. He took Lavi by the hands and squeezed them. "You're talking funny but that's it, right? You're still just as stupid and irritating and horny as you were before, right?" He lifted his eyebrows, and suddenly, as Lavi's eye wandered to his feet, became very aware of just how naked he was.

"I think so…" The redhead answered in a whisper. "You're still pretty. And I still wanna play with your hair." He looked up again, a crooked smile on his lips. "It's like I'm still _Lavi_ a little, just not much. Most of me is this fiftieth person that I don't know the name of."

"Fiftieth?"

"I've been forty-nine."

Kanda felt his eyes widen in muted shock. "And you never…" _Loved anyone else?_ His mind finished for him.

"I just… I wanted to see you before I run into the old Panda," the redhead mumbled, and he took a step away, keeping Kanda's hands in his own. He looked a bit panicked, frantic, but he didn't seem psychotic, or too mentally unstable. Lost, maybe. The color was coming back into his cheeks gradually, and he had yet to seriously notice his lover's nudity, which was a bit disconcerting. "Because… even if I'm _not_ Lavi, I'm still the same person who fell in love with you. And… if he tries to _change_ that somehow, if he tries to remind me that I'm not supposed to be connected to anything in this war…" He lurched forward, crying too hard and too suddenly for Kanda to do anything but watch him crumble, watch him fall to the floor, unable to say whatever it was that he had meant to.

Kanda grabbed the towel he had thought to have over the door and wrapped it around his waist before he knelt beside the weeping redhead, pulling him up into a cold, wet embrace.

Lavi choked on the words that continued to tumble from his mouth. "I love you n'I don't wanna lose you, but if he tries t'make me stay, I dunno if I can go… and even if he's ok with me leavin'… I—"

"Leaving?"

"I can't do both, Yuu-chan." The redhead blurted, looking up at the samurai with fear in his gaze. "I knew that I couldn't be a Bookman and be with you too, but it didn't matter. _Now_ it matters." His fingers tangled in Kanda's still dripping hair. "If I don't come tonight, it's either because he killed me or… or it's because _this_ me isn't real and I don't remember getting your note. But you _have_ to give it to me again if I don't." His voice did not do the desperation on his face justice as he leaned forward, tears still streaking down his cheek, though at a slower pace. "Because… even though it's really fucking odd to feel like this…" A little ironic smile lifted his lips, "It's ok. Because I feel like this." He let out a short, almost barking laugh, and tilted his head to the side, the same as he always had before.

Kanda felt something tighten in his chest and reached out, pushing his fingers beneath the dark fabric of Lavi's sweater, exposing the midnight blue shirt beneath. Without word, because he didn't know how to express the words at the moment, he tilted forward, bringing his own face into soft contact with the redhead's chest. Because his lover was the same, just new. This person was still Lavi, still tilted his head like Lavi, still smiled like Lavi, still talked and loved like Lavi. It wasn't as if Lavi had died, as if Lavi had never been real – it was as if Lavi had grown into something larger, and Kanda was the one who was allowed to witness it. He closed his eyes and listened to the beat of the larger boy's heart against his face.

"I don't care if I have to give you the same fucking note everyday for the rest of your life, you're mine, moron." The Japanese Exorcist hissed, though the words lacked proper malice. "My moron. Not that stupid geezer's." Kanda felt the redhead react in that same, Lavi-like way and looked up at him, studying the redhead's one, clearing eye. The samurai wondered if the apprentice Bookman realized what he was doing – or if he only sought Kanda out because of habit rather than fear. "You don't think you're Lavi, but you're pretty much the same. I think you just worry more… I think…"

Lavi nodded at him but he his smile faded. "I've been Lavi longer than anybody else. It makes sense that I'm still some of him." He shook his head, and the loose strands of his hair danced across his forehead with the motion until he closed his eye to it. "You're… ok with me like this, right? I mean… being Lavi but _not_ being him? You still…"

Kanda frowned deeply, feeling his eyebrows go together in an expression of annoyance. "Che. What do you think I am, stupid? I understood when you said that _you_ were different the moment you let me fuck you. And it doesn't matter. Moron. Everyone changes." He reached out and touched the sides of Lavi's face, forcing the idiot to look at him in the eye and see whatever emotion it was that filled him. It was hard for the Japanese man to describe what it was in his chest, what it was that made him want to break the same as his lover had, to declare himself someone completely different than who he used to be.

"_Your_ moron," Lavi cut off his thoughts in a whisper.

"_My_ moron."

The redhead smiled, and the palms of his hands pressed to Kanda's chest, warm on his still damp skin. "If you're ok then I'll go see if I can fake being normal long enough for Panda to go to sleep, then I'll head over. And you can still call me Lavi – I dunno any other name that really fits and that's what you know me as, so why change it, ya know?" He leaned forward, bringing his mouth to Kanda's, and kissed him shallowly. When he pulled away from the peck of contact, he was still grinning. "So we're gonna have sex tonight, right?" He blurted in that completely normal, completely Lavi-like way, eye sparkling with mischief. "It just isn't the same _imagining_ it for two weeks, ya know? And as great as cuddlin' – er… sharing space – is, I'd really like to get some before we go back to you being all anti-reciprocation."

Kanda's eyes narrowed into something that he knew resembled a glare but wasn't actually one. "Yes. We will. Now will you get out of my shower before someone sees us in here." The samurai growled, pushing himself away a bit. He had been right. Lavi was still Lavi.

"Oh…sorry."

-- -- --

Miranda had been completely right. Not _only_ had Yuu understood what he meant to say, the redhead also felt much more secure in his new self now that he had explained it to the samurai. It made him smile a little, knowing that at least _that person_ accepted what he had become, this… _not_-Lavi, and everything would be ok.

With that mindset, _Lavi_ – the new and feeling _him_ – made his way to his room, where he pulled off his sweater and kicked off his boots and crawled into bed early. The room was divided by a small nearly transparent partition of iron and fabric, on one side of which was his bed, desk, and dresser, and on the other were Bookman's, set to mirror one another. It was an odd way to live, and more often than not the partition was folded at its hinges and tucked away so they could spread newspapers and books around on the floor in messy piles of organized chaos, but it worked. He was given some scrap of privacy – because even Bookmen needed a little – and Bookman wasn't kept up at night by his late night log writing and rewriting, which meant the system functioned for both of them.

What it didn't do, however, was provide him with anything even remotely close to soundproof. If the old man was around, he'd hear everything short of a slightly rushed breath or a rather personal scratching of nails on fabric.

The bed squeaked and Lavi groaned, tangling the gray comforter around his shoulders and over his head. There was moonlight streaming in the window, cold and metallic, catching the open white curtain and dying it a soft shade of blue. It reminded him of Yuu's hair, as well as his exceedingly dark blue eyes, the too-light tone to his skin. A little smile took the apprentice Bookman's lips and he settled against his pillow. He only had a half an hour or so, and then he'd get to see the other boy again, Bookman would be sleeping, and all would be made right – for the moment.

As if his thoughts could conjure the old man from somewhere, the door opened inward, admitting Bookman as well as his scowl, a cigarette pinched between his teeth.

Lavi shut his eye, and relaxed his whole frame, intent on at least pretending to be trying to sleep.

"So this is where you were hiding from me?"

Bookman had always been better at picking out lies, even the physical kind.

"I don't feel too good…" Lavi avoided the question, but didn't open his eye. Instead he snuggled deeper into his blankets and rolled onto his side facing the wall. That way, with the moon shining in the window over his head, he doubted the older man could see his expression, overrun with shadows. "I bet I got your germs." He added, just because it seemed like a logical excuse.

Footfalls sounded softly behind him, moving toward the opposite side of the room. "You followed Kanda out of the cafeteria today," Bookman muttered almost conversationally, and Lavi's shoulders tensed. "Did you talk about anything of note?"

Lavi felt a rush of something dark and angry, something _bad_ well in his chest, and clamped his fingers in his blankets. His jaw clenched and a violent urge filled his stomach, enough to make his teeth grind and his voice come out a bit harsher than he wanted it to. "No. Just stupid stuff." He squeezed his eye shut. "Nothing… important…" He forced the words out knowing that they sounded like a lie, knowing that the older Bookman would call him on it the moment he stopped, feeling fear mingle with the emotion in his gut. He could only recall truly feeling it once, and only for a moment, the deep sort of aversion he felt toward his mentor at this point in time.

"Then you won't be sneaking out to meet him tonight, I presume?"

"Heh." His throat constricted on the sound. "Why would I want to do that?"

"Because he invited you, fool," Bookman's voice was closer than it should have been, as if he was trying to see through the fabric that divided their space. "And he's quite obviously in love with you." That though, was much quieter. It sounded to Lavi as if the old man had moved farther away, maybe in case the redhead did something violent very suddenly. "You're still lusting after him. Incapable of love or not, ignoring the temptations of the flesh at your age is practically impossible. You've already slept with him once. If you're not careful—"

"I'm not incapable." Lavi whispered the words, but they still made Bookman pause.

"What?"

"I'm not incapable." He repeated, a little more loudly. His fingers were biting into his palms and he didn't know when that had started. "I can…"

"You're a Bookman, Lavi." But the old man's voice didn't sound that sure. "You can't."

In a flurry of blankets the redhead found himself facing his mentor, his fingers clamped around the head of his Innocence – he hadn't taken it off of his leg and its presence soothed him no small amount. It knew him. No matter who he was, no matter what name he was supposed to go by, what person he claimed to be, his Innocence would always know him.

Just like Yuu.

Without even noting that Bookman was on _this_ side of the room's divider, and uncaring that the old man was looking at him with eyes that contrasted caring and anger in equal portions, Lavi threw the gray blanket on the floor and pointed, wild green eye contrasting with the wild mop of his crimson hair in the moonlight. He must have looked like a lunatic, with his hand aimed at the man who had cared for him for more than half of his life, emotions he couldn't control tearing at his chest, and dancing in his eye. He didn't care. He only cared about the frantic pounding of his heart and the feeling that this time, Bookman was wrong.

"I'm not. I love him. I love him and it doesn't matter how much you don't want me to, _I_ can't change that." Lavi watched his hand start to shake but he didn't care, there was too much of that _dark_ emotion in his chest. Too much anger and love and _hurt_ to do anything but scream. And he did scream. Loudly. "I love Kanda Yuu! Yuu Kanda! However you wanna write it in your fucking logs! I don't care! Still! I've tried it your way, Panda. I tried to just shut up and stop feeling, and it _didn't work_. It's not fair to _pretend_ not to love him when I do! It's not fair to any of us!" His pointing hand fell while his other hand wound painfully on his hammer, digging it into his skin. "And you just _say_ things like that. Like it doesn't matter. Like no one gets hurt. Like it's not _interfering _to cut yourself off from what other people feel!"

The elder Bookman's face took on a distinctly more angry expression, eyes wider. "There is a difference between being aware and being stupid, Lavi. You are being stupid."

_"You're_ being stupid! Telling me I can't be with him, telling me I don't know how to love, telling me I'm _Lavi_ and I have to be the next Bookman because _someone_ has to be the next Bookman and I just happened to be the orphan you talked into throwing his life away for your purpo—" The sound paused in his mouth at the contact of a very old and yet firm hand connected with the side of his face, knuckles hitting with enough force to bruise his lower jaw. Violence usually put a stop to whatever he was talking about, especially in a non-violent persona, but he didn't care what _usually_ worked. He wasn't finished even if Bookman was looking down at him like he had overstepped his bounds for the last time.

"Lavi—"

The redhead growled at the older man and pulled his Innocence from its holder, bringing it against his chest. It felt different. Warm. Like it agreed with him, like it wanted him to go on, and he trusted it enough to do what it wanted him to, to go on and use it as his courage. It was _his_. Not Lavi's, not Deak's, not Bookman's – and no one could take it from him.

"Lavi's not here," he hissed, eye narrowed. "It's just me now. Get it, Grandpa?"

Bookman backhanded him again, harder, and the redhead found himself looking sideways at his desk, face smashed up against the iron bars of his bed frame. There was blood on his lips, thick and metallic tasting, and he felt it trickle down his chin, coming from the side of his mouth.

Panda had never hit that hard.

"I thought I had taught you better."

The redhead rounded on his mentor, snarling. "It's not a problem with what you've taught me, it's an issue of what I _feel_!" This time he caught the wrist of the hand that meant to backhand him, holding it with bruising force. "It doesn't matter how much you hit me, this won't just _fix_ like you want it to. I don't want it to be fixed – I'm not broken! I was never broken! I was _normal!"_ His voice had risen in volume again but he didn't care, didn't care about the look that Bookman was giving him, didn't care about the surprise in the man's eyes or the panic in his own voice. He only cared about what he felt.

And then he knew. It was as clear as day, as simple as his own name. As easy to understand as addition and subtraction. If the forty-nine of them didn't work then it was obviously _him_ who remained, _him_ – the one that _felt_ everything. The constant. He _was_ normal. He had always been normal under everyone else.

Softly, just under his breath, the redhead spoke his own name.

The older Bookman made a short sound of anger and disappointment, but dropped the hand he had meant to hit the redhead with. He moved away from the bed and turned so he wasn't facing the redhead. He did not turn around when the boy shifted on the mattress, did not respond when the bed squeaked at weight leaving it, did not falter. Instead he faced toward the divider of their room, seeming to stare at it in quiet indifference.

"You gave up being that person," Bookman whispered without looking at him. The line of his tunic made him look shorter from behind, somehow elongated his head, like a very old child, or a very young old man. It was different and a bit creepy, especially with his hands folded up in his sleeves where Lavi couldn't see them. "You abandoned your name, you identity, and you joined the Bookmen. Are you taking all of that back now? If you _are_ that person… if you have created for yourself an identity that you will not change… I cannot keep you as my apprentice, nor can I help you to fix what you have become." The old man's voice quavered a bit, dangerously, and he rocked forward on his feet as if incapable of turning even if he wanted to.

Lavi stood behind Bookman, looking down at his mostly bald head, the strange curve of his hair, and reached up to touch his own face. With slow, shaking hands he untied the eye patch he always wore, but kept the eye that was normally hidden beneath it closed for the moment. He hadn't looked out of it for more than twelve years, he wanted the first thing it saw to be important. "I know that he's not immortal and I might… I might lose him no matter what I give up to be with him. But I can't," he shook his head, and lifted his right hand over his corresponding eye, that way he didn't have to hold it closed for the moment. "No matter what I'll miss in history, give up the chance I have. His chance. Ours." It hurt, really hurt, and he swallowed thickly, but that didn't stop his eyes from burning. His voice cracked in his throat. "If I walk away from him – if I do what you want me to, I won't be able to forgive myself for it."

Bookman's shoulder's tensed but he didn't show a reaction otherwise.

"You're…like my dad, Panda," the redhead whispered, and clenched the eye patch in his hand very tightly before he held it out to the older man, over his shoulder. "So I'm sorry. You'll find somebody better, I'm sure."

The older man pushed his hand away and made a strange, strangled sort of sound, a bit like a sniffle. "Keep it." He hardly breathed. "Taking it off won't make your life any easier."

"Grandpa…"

"I suggest you keep trying to act like Lavi, until the others are used to it."

"Bookman…"

"You may keep the books you were reading. Mine or otherwise." The old man went on unfazed. "This is not a reason to rob you of that knowledge, even if you aren't—"

Lavi curled his left arm around Bookman's shoulders, silencing him. The redhead knew Bookman was likely crying, sobbing silently, the same as he was. It wasn't the same as thinking some one dead, or watching someone suffer, or feeling someone lie: it was his own doing, his own hand with which he killed his future. He spoke very softly, aware that whatever he was saying would make it quietly into the annals of history, recorded as his last words as an apprentice Bookman – assuming the old man didn't change his mind and kill him on the spot once it was said. He wouldn't hold it against Bookman to do that either.

"Really, Panda." He sniffed quietly. "Take it. If I'm gonna die on you I might as well leave you something to remember me by. Ain't like you need it… or like… you love me or anything… so—" When the small, bony frame in front of him turned, he expected to be punched directly in the face for his words and called a fool like always, to be kicked in the shin with enough force to leave another bruise, but it didn't happen. Instead the older man embraced him in a strange reverse of their previous positions, wiry arms draped around Lavi's ribcage.

"Can't you let an old man suffer in peace, fool?" Bookman hissed against the redhead's sweater, tears staining his face with long black lines. "You've set me back decades – _decades_ with your antics! I should kill you." His arms tightened marginally and the boy placed his hands on the old man's shoulders, squeezing back, if only softly. "I should beat you until you give up on this stupid idea of yours," he went on more quietly, "but that would be interfering in the war, so I won't."

The redhead didn't answer at first, instead he just smiled through the tears and cracked his right eye open – because even if he'd rather it been Yuu, this wasn't something he wanted to forget either. He made a soft sound at the difference having two eyes made, even if all he could see for the moment was lights and colors in the right one. Blinking, fighting to speed the adjustment to even the dim moonlight, he looked down at his once-mentor and smiled crookedly, head cocked to the side, as if the expression was somehow painful. It scrunched up both eyes this time, which turned the image in front of him into a half-blurry blob of confusing mush, only most of which looked like Bookman. "I can see what you meant about taking it off not helping," he whispered, but reached back to press the eye patch into the old man's hand all the same.

Bookman withdrew a bit, though not as far as he would have in the past, and Lavi took a moment to wonder when his cigarette had vanished. It wasn't that important, he decided, when the old man took the little circle of fabric and looked at it, a fresh wave of moisture in his eyes. "You know that isn't what I meant." He fisted his hand on the eye patch before tucking it into his pocket almost indifferently – almost because the redhead caught his flinch. "Use your eyes carefully. God only knows what you might see with two of them."

Lavi smiled again, a little less widely, and turned his face to the window, looking out into the night sky with both of his eyes for the first time in forever. There were so many stars. And though most of them seemed to be little more than blurry smudges of lines through his right eye, he could already tell a difference. That wasn't what Bookman was warning against, he knew, but it gave the idea something of a physical aspect, a difference in his sight aside from the suddenly wider breadth of his vision and the depth objects had. Even if it was still out of focus, he could still see more than before. "I'll be careful."

"Now get out, —" Bookman bit in mock annoyance, and used his name for the first time in a very long while. "Before I change my mind."

"Keep callin' me Lavi." The redhead said, turning his gaze back. "Even if _I'm_ the only one who ever had two eyes, it'll still be confusing to just _switch_ on people. Yeah?" He ran his fingers over the ridge of his right eyebrow, unaware that shading the faded iris made it the same shade as the darker, emerald of his left, rather than mismatched from being hidden from the sun. The contrast was only minimal, but he would notice it the moment he looked in a mirror if he had ever been an apprentice Bookman. "You're really…" He tried not to let doubt creep into his voice. "Well, I guess… thank you is what I mean to say. For everything." He mumbled, and reached out to pat the older man on the head, which was something _Lavi_ never would have done. Not on his life.

Bookman shook his head, but his expression remained soft. "Go, fool. And if you have a fight I _will not_ take you back after this. I don't care if he breaks the heart you shouldn't have."

The redhead laughed softly, mirthlessly. "Yeah… he won't."

-- -- --

Kanda ran the brush through his hair again and again, no longer really paying attention to what he was doing. The cascade of his hair over his shoulder had long ago just turned into a black _thing_ against his neck, something to distract his shaking hands with. The brush now moved without hassle, sliding down his hair to the very ends and then a little further before he brought it up again, repeating the same motion over. The rhythm was good. It helped him to keep time without looking for a clock or casting his eyes out the window, or even turning his gaze to the flower in the far corner of his room.

His lotus. He'd thought about it as soon as he'd come in from his shower. The damn thing hadn't even _shifted_ since the town and now it was starting to bother him. At least, if he and Lavi _did_ get stuck on that mission tomorrow and he _did_ get hurt while on it, he'd be able to see if anything happened to it when he got back. Until then, he'd have to watch himself carefully. The last thing he wanted was to have it break without a magician around to fix it.

The brush came to the bottom of his hair again and he let it settle on his lap. The boar hair of it felt strange against his fingers, course and thick, almost wiry, a contrast to what he used it to untangle. It was a strange sensation to have that rough, almost scratchy texture on his fingertips and soft silk sliding over his legs, still cool in the night air. Thoughts of his life were pushed away for thoughts of Lavi and, through Lavi, the other Exorcists he knew and didn't care for. He focused his mind on the redhead, trying to understand their exchange in the shower completely, trying to imagine what Lenalee or Allen would say if they knew what exactly had transpired there, what _advice _they might lend. Kanda doubted Allen would have anything helpful to say, either something deplorably innocent or blatantly sexual, he was sure.

Lenalee would offer something more helpful, most likely point out that he and Lavi were still in love regardless of anything else, and then tell him to _communicate_ or something equally stupid and _girly._ He frowned just thinking about it.

Absentmindedly Kanda began to braid his hair over his shoulder, a style he never wore his hair in for fear of accidentally slapping himself in the face during a fight. The tangled cloud of a ponytail he could see through, a rope of braid could give him a black eye. But that didn't matter right now. The only thing that mattered was the fact that his hair was out of the way, and relatively comfortable hanging down the side of his head. The end of the braid was a bit big, being his hair wasn't exactly cut to lay that way, but he didn't mind it, it reminded a bit of a paintbrush by the tip. Which, to his horror, brought to mind Tiedoll and Lavi at once.

Tiedoll. What on Earth would the old General say if he knew?

Kanda could imagine it a little. If he tried. The old artist would blink at the word _love_ like he had never heard it before, then weep and insist on meeting this lucky girl named Lavi who had won his darling Yuu-kun and forced him to show his heart. And then there would be the long, arduous process of explaining that Lavi was _male_, suffering through forced portraits, the irritating discussion of _why_ and _how_ and _when_ and the whole fact that their relationship started with a kiss _Ursa_ had given Lavi…

He was never finding out. Everyone would be safer and happier if Tiedoll just went on thinking his precious Yuu-kun as an asexual heartless virgin for the rest of his life.

And there would be less posing.

Marie, on the other hand, would likely threaten Lavi with bodily harm and then accept him. The blind man was good with that sort of thing, and though Kanda doubted his long time friend would understand how one man could fall for another, he could not imagine the situation coming to any sort of violent or damning conclusion. His personality was likely to not take too well with Lavi's, but that was the way of things. They didn't have to be friends, anyway. As long as they could not kill each other and keep the truth from Tiedoll, Kanda didn't give a damn about how well the two bonded.

Without regard for how very much he did not like to think of the dead, his mind went to Daisya.

He pushed the thought from his mind.

Kanda stood up and paced the space between his bed and his dresser, clenching the boar hair brush in his right hand, braid bouncing on his shoulder. Why was even thinking of these things? He wanted to be thinking about important things. Like what he was going to say when Lavi came in, and how exactly, he was going to explain his logic, and just how he'd get his point through the redhead's skull. He began to scowl.

The material of his yukata made him frown as it swished along his knees. It was alien to him, suddenly, if only because of how tightly he had tied his obi, accidentally accentuating the curve of his hips with the wide, flat material. It was a few shades darker than the yukata, which annoyed him. Looking back red would have been better than blue, but he didn't have a red one. But knowing Lavi…

"Fucking… Goddamn it!" He cursed as he came back to his bed pulling Mugen into his lap.

What the hell was he going to _say_? Please be kind to me? That sounded stupid. He didn't know. What did men say when they gave something up that had that much meaning? What did anyone do when they meant to convey something they couldn't entirely understand themselves?

Kanda gave up on distracting himself with Mugen and just leaned his head in his hands, covering both of his eyes with the heels of them, grinding colors into the darkness behind his eyelids. He had never wished for anything as hard as he wished for something in that moment. He wished, in all selfishness, to know what words to say to make everything alright forever.

"If I love him…" Kanda whispered at his Innocence, unaware that he was speaking down at it. "_Why_ doesn't it sound like enough?"

-- -- --

**The last dribble of true angst, I promise. :D**

**Thanks for reading and reviewing! And being patient! I'm busy these days… D8 It's hard to write and not accidentally stay up until 4 AM. Sometimes scenes just eat me.**

**Anyhoo! Next chapter is (sadly) the last (I think). There might be an epilogue, but I'm about ninety-two percent sure it won't need one. ^^**

**Beta is MIA, so things will be a bit… typo-y until Seiyuurabu fixes stuff for me. 8D** [I really do love you for it~! EDIT: YAY! Beta'd!]


	25. Veracity and Equality

**There shall be an epilogue. I couldn't fit the end in here AND tie together all of the knots, so you get sweet-touching stuff and a sort of… epilogue/cover chapter to take the question out of everything that remains. Sorry this took so long, I had a hell of a time trying to make it ONE chapter with everything until I gave up. Oh well. One more to go!**

**SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG! I hope the wait was worth it!**

**Disclaimer: I do not own D. Gray-man. If I did… the Kanda-half-akuma thing would NOT have been left as a cliffhanger! D8**

**Warnings: SMEX. Yaoi. Lavi being VERY thoughtful. Conjecture on his right eye.**

-- -- --

Twenty-Five: Veracity and Fairness

The walk from his room to Yuu's had never been so long. The hallways, cluttered with people looking at him and murmuring, had never seemed quite as dark or cold. The stone of the floor was polished to a lacquered shine, but the rafters above were coated in a layer of dust so thick the redhead had to wonder if they had ever been touched with a rag, or if the Order just let them be, perhaps uncaring for the spiders that inhabited them in their undisturbed state. The walls were much the same as the floor up to a height, where the smoke of old gaslights had streaked them with near permanent black stains. The electric lights that now served as sconces left no such marks, but highlighted the ones left previously all the same.

The disk of the moon, waning through the Gothic arched windows, made him smile. It was quite large, the face on it perfectly distinguishable, and yet, it set everything into prospective for him. It had been more than a month since their first mission to Ursa's town, and so much had changed since then. He sighed and closed his right eye as he turned away from the window and down another dark hall, worried that he might see something unintentionally. It was difficult to tell when a person would be around the corner, and the last thing he wanted was to see the faults of a Finder's personality just by looking at him, not when it would already be shock enough for everyone to realize how much he had changed in the last twenty-some days of his life.

The redhead smiled. His life, though very different than he had expected it to be, was truly his now. He was an Exorcist with a large interest in history – he had to wonder if Bookman would still let him see things, things that no one else got to see, or if the old man would tell Komui right off that Lavi wasn't to be involved in any other secrets of the Order. He disliked the thought. What he could do with that sort of information he didn't know, but not knowing was somehow worse than the alternative.

His thoughts changed the moment Yuu's door came into sight, just as normal as the rest around it, marked with nothing but a number plate to the left of the wood and a quarter inch of light seeping from beneath the bottom. Moonlight, mostly, and maybe a lamp. Mood lighting – he almost chuckled.

It occurred to him as he raised his fist to knock that this was very different than before, but different in a good way. Not only was it him, it was also their reasons. He didn't _want_ Yuu, he _needed_ Yuu, and he had the strangest feeling that the swordsman felt exactly the same, though he went about expressing it differently. The more Lavi thought about it, the more he wondered what he would say. It took him only a short moment to decide that it didn't matter, words weren't important at this point anyway. He was perfectly fine with the thought of not being able to explain it, not being able to show what exactly it was that willed him to _want_ the other boy so close he might forget where his own body started, so he knocked three times with that thought. Yuu would understand what he meant, would understand that it wasn't just sex and cursing and teasing – it was something that had shattered his mind only to let him rebuild it again, better than it had been before.

A groan cued him to open the door and peek his head inside, fiery eyebrows pushed together over his mismatched eyes, both squished to the point of closing with his grin. "Sorry I'm late, I had to—"

"Where the fuck is your eye patch?" The question, most likely quite a bit angrier than intended, made him bring his left eye open to look at the man who had barked it. Kanda sat with his sword over his knees on the edge of his bed, the folds of his soft blue yukata falling around his ankles and pooling a bit around his waist, as if he had shifted and retied it to make it more comfortable. Lavi watched the scene take on more color, more light, as his right eye opened a moment later, drinking in every detail down to the weave of the fabric his lover wore. He could see the worry behind Yuu's annoyance, the love behind his anger, the _fear_ that showed in the harsh angles of his eyebrows – the redhead could see it all without thought or further examination, down to the slight, inviting tilt to Kanda's head. For a moment Lavi was lost in his lover's face and body language, taken aback by how much there was to see, to _know_ just by looking. He could have said a thousand things about the man in front of him that he had never known, and understood less than half of them.

He forced himself to stop before he saw something, some fatal flaw, that would let him understand things he shouldn't, squeezing his eyes shut. It was one thing to spot the telltale signs of a lie; it was another to find the truth behind a candid expression – almost making the mistake made him tremble.

The hand that took him by the fabric of his shirt and pulled him inside brought his eyes open again, and this time he did not search for the underlying cause of his lover's distress. Instead, he allowed himself to be guided forward, instinctually reaching out to take the smaller man by the shoulders.

"Where's your eye patch?" The repeated inquiry was quieter, coupled with the shifting of his lover's eyes from one side to the other, studying his gaze. Yuu's eyes really were deep blue gray, like charcoal dusted sapphire. "Lavi?"

"I gave it back." Lavi blinked a little, focusing his gaze on his lover's lips as he leaned to shut the door and fumbled for the lock. He did not speak until his fingers caught it. "I told Bookman that I quit and I gave it back," he reached out to run his fingers across the material of his lover's clothes. He frowned. Lavi had only seen Kanda in traditional clothes on occasion, and seeing them now brought strange ideas to mind. "You look nice." The words were little more than a whisper.

Kanda seemed momentarily relieved before his face hardened in an expression of slight confusion. "Quit? Quit what?"

The redhead felt himself smile. "Being a Bookman." He rocked forward on his feet, bringing his left hand up beside his right and dragged both down the V-shaped line of his lover's garment. Saying it now made it hurt less, because he had the man he wanted directly in front of him. "I said that I can't do both – I can't be with you _and_ be a Bookman, so I quit."

"You just…"

He couldn't help but laugh at the disbelief in his lover's expression. "I don't want to talk about it. Not right now. Right now…" Lavi lifted his hands to the sides of Kanda's face and pulled it gently upward, aware of the fingers that danced against his cheeks with timid gentleness. The Japanese man was studying his features anew, he realized, submitting to memory the lines of his eyes and face. Lavi ignored that fact just long enough to go on. "Right now I want you like before, only I want you to lean down enough for me to tell you how much I love you the whole time you're inside of me, Yuu. Because it's really, really important that I tell you that." He whispered, and leaned forward at once, bringing their foreheads together in a half embrace.

"But you quit—"

"_Please_ not right now. We can talk about that when we talk about why you hit Komui."

The long haired man's eyes dropped to the redhead's lips, and his voice cracked oddly when he spoke, hardly even managing to stir the air with his words. "Fine. But I want to… I want to give you something." The way he paused was a hint that Lavi didn't understand, a release of something that he couldn't name. Yuu's hands felt cold to Lavi's skin.

"Yuu-chan got me something? Hell must be cold tonight."

"Che. Shut up."

"You wanna save it for afterward? I don't mean to rush, but I'll be thinking up sweet nothings to whisper the entire time I'm not doing it."

Kanda shook his head a little, which only succeeded in rocking their skulls together with the motion. His braid bounced. "I want you to…" He wet his lip and his eyes fell shut, his head tilted back enough for Lavi to see determination written across his beautiful features so surely the redhead doubted the expression would ever leave. "Have… I want you to have…" Kanda's eyes, filled with inward pointed anger, opened in a rush, deceptively-long eyelashes fluttering against his upper lids. What he wanted was in every shadow and line of his face, and yet, when Kanda's mouth opened, no words came. He simply floundered, unable to make even the simplest of noises to convey his thoughts.

"It's ok," Lavi whispered, and tried to pull the Japanese man close again. "You don't have to give me anything you don't want to, or anything you're unsure of. We've got… vacation time, and then some more after the next mission if you want to wait—"

The swordsman's fingers fell to Lavi's shoulders and fisted in his shirt. "It's not fair to leave things like this."

"That's an odd thing coming for _you_, Yuu."

Kanda shook his head so the cord of his hair nearly slapped him in the face. "No, I mean…" His eyebrows furrowed a little and his fingers tightened, drawing the redhead into him. He seemed so very unsure of himself, so very weak and shy, that Lavi nearly stopped him from going on. But the once apprentice Bookman couldn't stop him yet. "If you will have… if you want… you can have…" He resolved himself with a harsh swallow, building up courage that cued Lavi to wait – he would be patient being he wasn't much good at saying what _he _felt most of the time either – while Yuu met his eyes determinedly. _"Me."_ Yuu finished at last, eyes turned away from Lavi's almost at once. Once the word was out it unleashed a flood of others, toppling over each other in a nearly indiscernible torrent. "Just one time. Maybe. I'm fucking annoyed that you lied about your eye so much, and I want to talk to you about all sorts of things, like our mission, my life, how much I _love_ you, but I honestly can't do that. When I close my eyes and think of it, think about what you gave to me and the things I said…"

Lavi tugged him a bit toward the mattress, which in turn let their hands slip down to touch waists and chests, rather than clinging to shoulders. The redhead sank down onto the bed and his lover did the same beside him, only inches apart.

He wasn't sure what to think, but he was sure he was blushing.

"Yuu," he started in a whisper, feeling more than a little awkward. "Are you saying that… you want me to…" He wanted to mime, but that would mean letting go of Yuu, so Lavi shifted his left eyebrow toward his right in a suggestive expression. "Do what you did last time?" He finally managed, suddenly understanding why his lover would have such trouble conveying his thoughts. Instead of waiting for the slow, shaky affirmative he knew he would get, Lavi leaned forward and bought his lips to the dark haired man's, kissing him with such passion he doubted the message would be lost on the swordsman no matter what he was thinking. Lavi pressed against his lover so that the force between them matched perfectly, fingertips roaming into the base of Kanda's braid while a palm smoothed the skin of his stomach, pilfering a touch while he was too occupied to protest.

When Kanda broke the kiss they were both flushed, but he seemed better off for it, courage evident in his features. "I know what I said, and I know that you're fine with not… pushing me, but…" He blushed more deeply than Lavi had ever seen, mouth a flat line of concentration. The Japanese man was sure of himself; it was just getting the words out of his mouth that seemed to be the impossible issue. "Will you take… this? If you don't, I won't be angry. Not any more than normal. If you want me in—"

"Yuu-chan," Lavi broke in softly. He ran his hands down Kanda's chest to the line of his obi and then back up again, only to pause over his lover's heart. "You did this for me, didn't you? Wore something traditional and made your hair look nicer than normal… it's still wet, isn't it?" He let a soft smile take his lips and slid forward until his knees touched Kanda, which evoked a strange sort of shudder from both of them.

Yuu didn't respond verbally, but his expression marked the words as true.

Lavi reached out and cupped the side of his lover's face with his right hand. "What reason would I have to say no?"

"Che." It was out of the long-haired boy's mouth like a curse. He did not, however, pull away. Instead, he tilted his face into the hand on his cheek and smirked mirthlessly, fear dancing behind his half-hooded eyes. He lips parted, but it was a long quiet moment before he spoke. "I don't know, but you seemed pretty set in what you wanted in the hall. It's not fair though, or even, or… I don't know the word for it, but the point is that, even if it's just once… I want you to…"

Lavi knew that was wrong. There was no _fairness_ in love, because then it wouldn't hurt so much. The more he thought about it though, the more he mulled that thought over, the less he thought he was right, but now was not the time to philosophically examine his feelings. He was too new to love to say that he knew anymore than Yuu did.

The redhead silenced Yuu with a kiss, running his thumb over the flushed flesh of his lover's cheek. Without a word Lavi slipped an arm around the samurai and moved himself forward until his knees parted, allowing him to perch on the dark haired man's lap a little awkwardly. From there he could look down at Kanda's expectant eyes and kiss him again, more deeply, painting lines of contact down his lover's neck and chest with his fingers. To his surprise there were hands on his lower back and then their bodies were leaning, his weight pushing the smaller man down against the covers. Almost at once he shifted back a bit, which broke the kiss and left Kanda under him, looking up with sultry dark eyes, leaning on his elbows.

Lavi swallowed thickly and paused, watching his lover's face for a moment. He watched the fear and the expectancy, the love and the comfort, the uncertainty and determination. For a brief moment he saw every vulnerable thing about Yuu, and every thing he could say to make him break like a glass in his hands.

It wasn't a talent, though Bookman had thought it might be one. It was more terrifying than anything he had every known.

"Hey, Yuu-chan," Lavi whispered, and let himself ease against the samurai's chest until he was laying rather lopsidedly across him, painfully aware of just how close he was to touching skin. Fingers trailed up his back but he ignored them, shivering. "I love you. Lots. I _love_ you." He felt a goofy smile spread across his face and tilted his head to the side in something of a mock shrug. "I _loooove Yuu._" He chimed with a childish giggle.

They were safe words, words that would bring Yuu back to what they were and not whatever he was worried they might be.

Kanda's palm connected to his forehead in a silent slap of irritation. "Moron."

"Yours. _All_ yours."

"Fucking shut up and kiss me."

That was what Lavi wanted. Not a weak, breakable Yuu, but a fierce, angry, loving Yuu. They were the same person, the same thing, but he did not want to make this any more emotional than it already was. He kissed Kanda again and again, harder and more desperately until his left hand hooked in the Japanese man's braid and fingers slipped up his shirt, nails catching his stomach. Even if he wanted it to be romantic, he realized a bit too late, there were physical things that threatened make him forget the feeling behind his actions. There was so much want – so much _need_ – that the source of the fuel was forgotten in the heat of the flame between them.

And then Kanda said it, in a whisper against the side of his neck, between love bites. "I love you too, Moron."

Lavi stopped worrying.

He slipped his hand across Kanda's stomach, loosening the fabric around the Japanese man's chest. The yukata didn't come off, or open completely, but the soft fabric moved with his fingers until it exposed a goodly portion of Kanda's chest. Lavi hunched down to it, kissing the smaller man's collar bones, moving on in a steady downward line.

Kanda growled softly at him, encouragingly, and pulled him up again for what he thought was a kiss. Instead the samurai bit into the soft flush on the underside of Lavi's throat. It wasn't too harsh, but the contrast of pain and pleasure made everything more sensitive from the bottoms of his bare feet to the top of his head. Kanda took advantage of his stopped breath to speak against his right earlobe, husky already.

"Let's aim to go twice," he whispered, fingers on Lavi's back dragging his shirt toward the redhead's shoulders. "Because I fucking _want_ you and I don't think sweet and slow is going to do it for me." His right hand fisted in the redhead's hair, driving Lavi's head back a bit before he yanked it down, hard, the better to suck at the bruise he had left with his teeth.

Lavi would have nodded, but the soothing tongue on his skin dictated otherwise. Instead he spread his palms against Kanda's flesh to give himself leverage, and rocked his hips forward. The bump beneath his lover's yukata pressed hard and sure against the one at the crotch of his pants and he moaned softly at it before he reached down to stroke any skin he could find. In the process he met Kanda's narrowed eyes and shivered, a tiny trace of fear running up the back of his spine.

Kanda's face – the line of his mouth, the furrowed eyebrows, the anger in his gaze – the Japanese man wanted him, loved him, didn't like being on his back, hated the thought of being nervous, felt sick with himself over his thoughts, wanted to push that away, wanted to be naked, and didn't like the way Lavi was looking at him.

The redhead shut his eyes and fought to keep his hands steady, breathing with a force of will. He didn't want to know what Kanda was feeling, what he was thinking. He didn't want to know what he could say to shatter that hard external shell. It wasn't his place. It was anything but his place to bend the person he loved like a tool, to open him up with his own internal mechanisms. Deak would have done it without a blink of an eye, but that didn't mean Lavi would.

"Lavi?" His name was soft on the older boy's lips.

He cracked his eyes and immediately regretted it. The signs of concern, worry, feigned anger – he felt sick. "Sorry, Yuu. I'm not… I'm not used to having two eyes yet."

"Motion sickness?"

"No." Lavi shook his head and screwed his eyes shut. "I can see… Bookman wanted me to join him because of the things I can see with my right eye – you know, stuff people shouldn't… see. You…" His eyes shocked open, Kanda's left knee pushed up into his crotch, and he dragged them shut again with a groan. "Please don't make me look."

"What the fuck is there to see, _baka_? Nothing. There's me."

Lavi shook his head again, emphatically. "There's you and everything you think and feel and how I can…" He really felt sick, so sick, even knowing what he could do. The eye patch had been much more use than he had known. "When I look, I can see that you're nervous, that you love me, that you don't like being on your back, that it reminds you of something, that your mind is contradicting itself and it's driving you a little bonkers, but you're still ok." He looked, very timidly at Kanda then, gauging his reaction. "A long time ago…" Lavi whispered without meaning to. The frown of Kanda's lips told him the story. "Someone did something to you in order to let you live. And it's worrying you. You think… you're thinking that even though you've got me, you might die before I know that this means more than sex and words. That's why… that's why…"

Kanda shoved him just hard enough to change their positions. His hands, suddenly cold, fisted in Lavi's shirt and he growled, low and guttural. "Shut up," his fingernails were biting skin but he didn't seem to notice. The strands of hair that had escaped his braid dangled around both of their faces, heavy with the lingering scent of soap, soft where they brushed skin. "Shut up. I'm doing this because I love you. Don't fucking pretend you understand me." He hissed with uncharacteristic venom.

"You asked me what I saw," Lavi closed his eyes again as he reached out for the man above him. He was unsurprised when Kanda allowed the embrace, but was slightly stunned by how tightly it was returned. "That's why Bookman wanted me as his apprentice, because I see what people hide. Just… I can't control it. I didn't think it would be a big deal so I—"

"Use your hands." Kanda growled from his throat, nipping at the skin at the redhead's right collar bone.

Lavi stiffened. "Huh?"

"Che." Kanda's hips rolled in a reminder of what the night was supposed to contain. "You know what I look like. You know how to do it. So keep your fucking eyes closed and stop complaining." As if to prove his point, the samurai moved his hips again with an ill suppressed groan. "I want to do this. _Now."_

There was something about the force of the last word that made Lavi's hands cup the sides of Kanda's face and draw him down again for one more romantic brush of lips. When it was finished, after his tongue had explored the smooth surface of Kanda's and his mind was satisfied with the flavor of his lover's skin, he fought with his lover's clothing. It was difficult to follow the silk obi around his lover's back, harder still to undo it, but he managed. All the while he moved his hips in a slowly building rhythm and ignored the press of the Japanese man's nails to the back of his neck and base of his spine until they tore his shirt off. After that, the touches became harder to ignore.

Kanda's fingers worked at the fasteners of Lavi's pants until his erection bobbed free, which tempted the younger man to open his eyes. He didn't. He reached out and found Kanda's hand so he could bring it to his length and guide it in the first, amazing stroke, fire dancing down his spine with it. He moaned softly while his left hand fumbled for Kanda's hips and down, down into the folds of his yukata.

"_Rabi…"_ It was a desperate sound, like a final plea. But what Kanda wanted Lavi could only guess.

Beneath yukata and boxers, his fingers found his lover's arousal and he knew what they both wanted at once. To make love. With that thought in his mind and his hand moving in a gradual rhythm against Kanda's heated skin, Lavi opened his eyes a little, both at once. He saw it, under everything else, the strange, confused, gentle creature that his lover really was, and the love behind his extensive front. The want of the samurai – his desires – were as obvious to Lavi as they would have been if they had been his own. The redhead made it his goal to give Kanda everything he wanted.

With nervous hands he pushed the Japanese man away and shucked off his pants, casting them aside without a mind to where they landed. It didn't matter at the moment if he'd ever find them again. What mattered was Kanda's bound hair against his lips and the catch in the other man's throat, the mysterious, confused expression on his lover's face when he took all of Yuu's weight on his hips, leaning on the pillows. His shaking fingers moved to push down the Japanese man's underwear and expose the parts of him that his rumpled yukata no longer covered. The lines of Kanda's hips shivered under Lavi's fingertips and the length of him twitched against Lavi's palm.

"_Yuu…"_ He squeezed softly and turned his face enough to kiss the smooth skin of Kanda's right cheek. _"Please…"_

The swordsman shook his head and jerked his chin to the side. "Che. Do it. Under the bed."

"Do it under the bed? That's kinky…"

Kanda would have rolled his eyes and glared at the same time, but that it didn't seem to be physically possible. "The oil, retard."

Lavi shook his head, a lewd little twitch crossing his lips. "Twice, remember?" He shifted until he was flush with Yuu, groins aligned, and opened his hand a bit in order to cue Kanda to do the same. Shivering, Lavi wound his fingers around both of them, flesh to flesh in a way that was new to both of them. It was a bit awkward, with Yuu more or less sitting on his lap facing him, but the position would work for what he wanted. "You don't wanna be limpin' right?" Lavi cocked his head to the side and shot an all too casual and disarming smile, one that would undoubtedly make Kanda hit him.

"Che. Whatever." One hand joined Lavi's while the other twined in the redhead's mussed and tangled locks. "Oi, _Usagi._"

"You can go back to _koneko_ if you like, I felt cuter."

The Japanese man's eyes narrowed. "Fuck you."

"Technically I think you mean 'fuck me,' Yuu-chan." Lavi smirked and emphasized with an extra bit of pressure from his fingers, to prove his point.

"I love you, too. And care. And fuck you."

Lavi grinned at him. "Aw, you're only like, seven times behind me now, or something."

"Che." Kanda moved his hand and his hips at once, which in turn cued Lavi to return the motion. It wasn't bad like that, both of their hands and all of that sensitive flesh in a single area, and it was enough to make the Japanese man pause before he went on. "Whatever. I've got—" He had to stop to gasp. "A good month on your ass. Doesn't matter how often I say it." His palm and his thrusting had established a rhythm that he began to breathe to, which made verbal conversation difficult. Instead, he leaned up enough to catch Lavi's mouth in a kiss, which said enough for both of them.

Lavi found that closing his eyes to it blocked out many things that he wanted to see, but he did it anyway. He was too tempted to read the fingerprints of Kanda's soul. Instead he lost himself in their motions, in their rhythm, and fought to match Kanda stroke for stroke, thrust for thrust, kissing and moaning between harsh, panting breaths. It was not until the samurai arched from the mattress and bit him that he realized how long it had gone on, how fast and hard they were moving. With a low cry he changed angle, ignoring the little protest that got him, as well as the growing tightness in his loins.

Kanda's left hand squeezed at his shoulder in warning and the pressure, the heat, built too much for Lavi. His hand clamped a bit more tightly and his hips rolled furiously. A word bubbled up out of his mouth as he came, wetting both of their hands before Kanda, with little more than a low grunt of completion, joined him.

Opening his eyes, Lavi beheld this lover's teary-eyed face and tried to look reassuring. He kissed both of the Japanese boy's eyes before he leaned back enough to grab the oil, smearing their mixed seed on the bottle and the sheets. Maybe that was disrespectful to sword oil, but Lavi couldn't say he cared at the moment.

"Hey, Yuu," Lavi mumbled, paying attention to his fingers on the lid of the oil rather than how his lover was wiping his eyes and arranging himself over the wrinkled bedding. "If we do go tomorrow, we can have sex on the train if we kick out the Finder. Or in the Ark, if we're stealthy." It was so much easier to talk about stupid things than it was to look his lover in the eyes. "But if we stay, we can cuddle all fucking day if we want to."

Kanda made a sound between _che_ and a chuckle, and his fingers moved out to touch Lavi's face and turn it toward him. His hands were gentle, though a little more forceful than was absolutely necessary. They pulled Lavi closer until the redhead found himself leaning between Yuu's knees. "I don't care," he breathed, and the sheer _honesty_ in his face nearly made Lavi drop the bottle in his hands. "I really, really don't want to talk right now." Kanda kissed the redhead deeply, his right leg hooked around Lavi's hips, his left hand tugging at the larger boy's right earring. When the kiss broke he held their foreheads together, still holding Lavi's eyes with his own. "You can't see that?"

Lavi moved the dripping fingers of his left hand down between them, trailing a wet line down the inside of Kanda's right thigh. The caress wasn't needed – he could very well sense the heat coming from the Japanese man's body that warned of renewed arousal – but it guided his fingers where they need to be. He brushed gently up what he could reach of the cleft of his lover's buttocks, the better to introduce them both to the new, terribly intimate contact. That heat, coupled with their closes, the places and things he could see and feel, left Lavi aware of his own returning hardness and warned him that they were going to be in for a very long night if his body was anything to go by.

"See?" Kanda's voice was nearly a breath of wind and little more, pitched so Lavi found himself inclined to watch his lips form the words rather than pay attention to the sphincter of muscle against his fingers. "Che. Idiot, I told you it was just me."

A bitter sort of smile crossed Lavi's lips. He pressed gently inward until his ring finger was buried to the first knuckle. "Sorry, Yuu." He wiggled it a bit, waiting for some kind of reaction.

Yuu was perfectly relaxed at the intrusion, perfectly focused. "Let's stay tomorrow," it might have been the first time Lavi had heard him even suggest not taking a mission. "And why the hell are you being so slow? I'm not a doll, moron. Just stick your—" The finger slipped and he shuddered befittingly, a gasp in his throat. Kanda's eyes widened before they returned to normal, and his hands curled a bit into the back of Lavi's neck, not warning so much as holding him decidedly still. "Better." His voice came out husky and he hiked his leg a little higher on his lover's back.

Lavi pushed a second finger next to the first, a bit mystified by how the flesh around them seemed to both cling and shift to accommodate him. When Yuu did not protest, he watched the swordsman's mouth for any signs of discomfort and pressed on, curling his fingers gently in an effort to find the back of the older boy's prostrate. It wasn't overly moist the farther he went, but Yuu didn't complain, so he didn't stop. Not until Yuu's mouth fell open in a little gasp of sensation, a startled little whimper on the Japanese man's lips.

The redhead smiled.

"You knew that was coming, huh?" Lavi curled his fingers again, a little harder, and watched Yuu's lips part a little more, hardly soundless, his hips jerking in response. The redhead wondered if it was pride that kept his lover silent. If it was, it was stupid. "Is it good, Yuu?"

"_Yes."_ Yuu's back bowed away from the mattress as Lavi spread his fingers in an effort to stretch the muscles more, faster now. Yuu leaned up to kiss along the redhead's jaw and down the side of his neck, nibbling at the sensitive flesh, breathing across the shell of his ear. They both moaned at once when Lavi's third finger snaked beside the other two and Kanda's teeth found the once apprentice Bookman's left earlobe. It was a moment of infinite balance between them, with Kanda's right hand buried in Lavi's hair, his teeth on that delicate nub of flesh, Lavi's left hand thrust nearly into him, left clutched desperately at his waist. There were no roles or obstacles, it was only need and love and desire, together and separated by their skin.

Lavi felt suddenly as if that was much too intimate – that they were far too close to just melting into one another somehow. He pulled his left hand away and fumbled for the oil he had nearly spilled on the mattress, smearing it over his length half desperately. Yuu's hand joined him – not the one in his hair – and together they smeared mineral oil down his arousal, wordlessly. It was cold and wet, but Lavi didn't care, and Yuu didn't seem to either. They were eager for one another, more so than they had been the first time.

When the long-haired Exorcist rolled Lavi against his pillow and jerked him to sitting, the redhead did not ask questions. Instead, he kissed the samurai and pulled his hips down, aligning them so they might kiss and touch more easily than they had before, than they had when the very man he was with had insisted that this was not what he wanted.

It made him smile so hard, he thought his face would crack.

"_Good,"_ Yuu repeated the word belatedly, then met Lavi's gaze, a strange sort of pain dancing behind the sapphires of his eyes. Perhaps it was his pride rebelling a final time. "I should have known." What he meant, Lavi couldn't have guessed without relying on his right eye, and he didn't want to do that at the moment, not _now_. He didn't have the chance to. Without further warning, Yuu started to move himself down on the redhead's length, mouth open in an expression that wasn't quiet one of hurting. He didn't stop, and Lavi knew he wouldn't, so there were no protests. There was only Lavi's right hand suddenly flailing up behind him for the bed frame and Kanda's thighs quivering when he was half way there, a strangled mewl in the back of the Japanese man's throat.

With an awkward lurch, Lavi leaned himself against the iron frame and returned his hands to Yuu, stroking at his sides. He ignored the damned ache in his erection. It wasn't important. It was important that this man was straddling his hips, breathing like he'd hurt himself something awful but was too stubborn to admit it. Lavi didn't like the thought. He reached out and curled his arms around the swordsman's waist and supported his lower back in an effort to ease him down more slowly; answering fingernails bit into the flesh of his shoulders, leaving half-moon scratches that he didn't feel at the moment.

It might have taken five minutes for him to realize Kanda's tight, rippling body was all around him, _engulfing _him, and Yuu looked at him with eyes like soulful blue gemstones. They were both panting, though for decidedly different reasons. The moonlight streaming in Kanda's window painted them both in faded shades of pink and periwinkle, contrasted by the soft oranges and yellows cast by the lamp on the other side of the room. The glimmer of gold in Yuu's eyes was the fault of a light source, but the red of his cheeks had nothing to do with the light.

"Yuu?" Lavi's voice shook to the point that he sounded near tears. He rubbed at the base of his lover's spine and tried to smile. "Relax, it makes it easier, okay? I can—" The slightest shift of the other man's weight left him gasping, "I can wait."

Kanda leaned forward and kissed him, fingers to his cheeks as though Lavi might break if handled too strongly, his eyes half hooded. In the mixed metallic light Lavi saw something strange and foreign in his lover, Yuu, the ice cube of a man he had fallen in love with. Something neither of them had an overabundance of in their lives – tenderness. It was evident in the slow way the samurai pushed his hair out of the way, the gentle play of his hands against the bare expanse of Lavi's chest. Kanda's hands, however strong, ghosted down over his lover's stomach, and trembled their way back into his hair.

It was a long time of breathing and forced relaxing, touching and nuzzling, before either spoke again.

"If anyone ever asks, I never told you this," Yuu whispered against Lavi's lips, very still on the redhead's hips. His voice was husky and low with what they had done already, and his hands fisted in Lavi's hair, drawing his head forward. "But…_yappari…_ Why didn't you tell me it's so…" He tapered off with a quick shake of his head, the words that he meant to say dying on his lips.

Lavi couldn't help but grin regardless of how much his face was starting to ache with the expression. He tried to run his dry right hand through the dark haired boy's tresses but instead tangled his fingers in the base of the braid. He used his hold to pull Yuu's face closer. "You wanna try movin' then? You're like a vice in there."

A strange, twisted smile took Kanda's mouth. "Lavi." It was if he hadn't been sure about what he was doing before, but now he was. He rocked back and started forward, and Lavi met him halfway, slow and steady, both of them suddenly breathless. _"Moron…"_ Kanda hardly breathed the insult.

"I know." Lavi mumbled back, leaning into Yuu's weight. It was strange like this, buried in Kanda's body so surely, fire dancing up his spine – because the urge to talk almost outweighed the urge to satisfy his own needs. It could wait though, until afterward.

He pushed forward until Yuu had to teeter back against the mattress, a mild look of amusement on his normally hard features. At that angle, with the smaller man's legs clamped up around Lavi's back, the redhead found himself free to move if he wished to, no longer constrained by the other man's weight. The view was spectacular. The coils of Kanda's hair stretched out around him in an ebony fan of tangles and mussed braid, almost blue between the lamp and starlight, thick and still slightly damp. The urge to bury his face in it almost undid Lavi but he stopped himself, and instead gazed imploringly at the Japanese boy, curious if they could go on.

Kanda rolled his hips and Lavi answered with equal force, and pressed his face in the curve of the dark haired man's neck. The redhead's stomach grazed Kanda's arousal with the movement, the hands that clutched at him felt like they might be bruising, but Lavi didn't pay attention. He did pay attention to Yuu's mouth crashing into his though, as well as the low, demanding sound in Kanda's throat. He understood both. He understood what Kanda meant.

Pulling away, the samurai caught the redhead's lower lip between his teeth, drawing a gasp from him. It was nearly too much – just that little touch of pain with pleasure – and Lavi unleashed a low, needy moan at it, driving his hips with more speed.

His lover tilted back his head and cursed.

"I'm not hurtin' you, am I?"

"Che," there might have been a hint of a smile in the sound, "not really. I can't believe you cried."

"You have smaller fingers."

"And a bigger—"

Lavi laid his teeth on the smaller man's jaw and bit a warning, because that was _not_ pillow talk – or true – no matter how funny Yuu thought it was. The teasing though, made him more comfortable. "Can you get your legs a little higher so we can do this right? Because I think this is the end of my stamina for the night unless you wanna pretty much wring me out to dry, so…" This time when he shifted into the back of the other man's prostate it was by accident, and the muscles around him squeezed to the point that he choked on his next words, groaning into Kanda's skin. There was a matching sound over his head and Kanda's hips strained forward as if out of his control. The legs on Lavi's ribcage reached higher and the fingers on his shoulders moved to his hair, dragging him into a kiss he could not concentrate on long enough to return with any form of grace or feeling.

"_Motto…"_ Kanda bucked while he said the word against Lavi's mouth, which proved it was anything but a lie. His arms betrayed him however, when they curved up to hold Lavi closer, his fingers still wound at the back of Lavi's head, showing that there was more to his request than physical desire. _"Rabi."_

The redhead smiled again, this time against Kanda's lips. "I love you." It was the only answer he could think of.

"_I know,"_ the Japanese man whispered, and kissed him again, holding him at that angle that made moving difficult but so very worth it. Lavi could feel every twitch and response of Kanda's muscles that his movements incited, and found himself responding to them almost subconsciously, like a dance with no lead. It occurred him that they fit well together physically, but he couldn't think about it more than a little, too focused on the press of his lover's knees to his upper chest, stronger now, and the pain of teeth to his lower lip, hard and tantalizing. There were so many things he could have said, but none of them worked as well as the lack of words for the moment.

Kanda made a sound that might have been a cough or a laugh and rolled his hips a little harder, cuing Lavi to return the favor. "Aim bet—_fuck!_" His hands curled in the hairs on the back of Lavi's neck and he arched a bit, driving himself down and back, slamming into the redhead's hips. He did it again, hard and fast, and growled into Lavi's throat, breathily. _"There_. Just like that. Give me your—" He cut himself off with a fierce blush, mouth open soundlessly.

Lavi almost had to stop to laugh. He was too breathless to form a proper sentence, but he tried. "Keep sayin' things… like that, Yuu… an' I might…"

The long haired man tilted his head away, hiding his reddened cheeks, and, to Lavi's slight horror, obliged in a soft whisper. Lavi felt a matching blush run through his whole body, face stretched in a smile so wide his face was bound to be sorer than Kanda's ass when they were finished. He cursed softly, damning the fact that this moment couldn't last forever.

"_Koi…"_ Kanda fell into Japanese after a moment, mumbling things that Lavi couldn't understand and likely was better off not knowing. The samurai moved against the redhead almost desperately, and growled low and harsh in his throat.

Lavi met Kanda's desperateness with an equal amount of his own. Between the constraining pressure on the length of him, and the heat gathered inside of Kanda, how could he not? He tried not to think about the trust between them, and focused on the sensations: the sound of their skin touching, the press of Kanda's left hand on his back, the pull of fingers on his shoulder, the wet, open mouth on his. His whole body shivered. They were so close to each other, so damnably close, and yet he didn't care how close they were, he wanted more. He heard himself gasp, heard Kanda mumble out some kind of mixed language warning, and shut his eyes, toeing the edge of panic and orgasm at the same terrifying time.

He didn't know if he could concentrate on not seeing every flaw and truth in Kanda when he came.

One of them whined, but he couldn't say who.

"_Rabi… miru…rook-u—"_ Kanda's voice drew his eyes open the same time that Yuu's fingers tugged his head down. He met the other man's gaze unwaveringly, took note of the moisture in Kanda's eyes, the love in them, and felt it reflected in his own face. But he couldn't catch the details at the moment. He couldn't do anything but hold on for dear life. He watched the samurai's mouth open at a slightly downward angle, watched his eyes widen with sensation, his head tilted back in a way that looked almost as painful as it did beautiful. Lavi felt every muscle clamp in the smaller man's body and groaned at the combined feeling. The heat, the press of Kanda's flesh on his, Kanda's hands on him, Kanda's scent around him – it was so much at once, and yet it was the broken sound of his name that sent him spiraling over the edge and into oblivion. He felt his lover stiffen and a wave of pleasure intense enough to shut his eyes and close his hands on Kanda's frame washed through him, shaking him from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. It was different than before with that intense pressure around his length, different with his heart in it, different with Kanda moaning and moving for both of them. Yet Lavi couldn't think to try and understand what it meant. He could only feel.

His right hand was tangled almost painfully in Japanese man's hair, pulling the his lover's face up, while his left was clenched on the pale skin of Yuu's hip, likely bruising. They were both breathing heavily, sticky with sweat and other things, but Lavi really couldn't find it in himself to care.

The once apprentice Bookman didn't speak for a long moment. He watched his lover's closed eyes come open first, and felt his chest tighten at the two glimmering tears he found there. Before he hadn't see them, only felt them dribble onto his chest. Now though, he could watch them fall, first the left, then the right. Lavi closed his eyes to the burning behind his own and brushed his bruised lips against Kanda's parted ones. "You ok?" He hardly whispered the words, worried they might distress the man beneath him.

The samurai didn't wipe the tears away. Instead, he gave a wordless nod, his sweaty hair tangling on the blankets he laid on. His expression was somewhere between a smile and a grimace, perhaps made that way by the reaction his eyes had to intimacy. "Will be." Kanda admitted softly. "You?" His fingers, which were somewhat unsteady, roamed their way to the redhead's face and touched it, pushing sweat soaked hair out of Lavi's eyes. They were warmer than normal.

"Yeah," Lavi swallowed hard and tilted his head into those fingers. "So what do you think, Cupcake? Shower and sleep so we can get up and go tomorrow? Or snuggling naked until we both fall asleep around dawn?"

Kanda managed a glare that didn't quite hide the amusement in his voice. "If you call me that again you can _snuggle_ with the floor."

"You're no fun at all, Dear."

"I will push you off and kick you if you keep at it." Kanda's voice regained some of it's usual harshness. "How about you shut up and we go for round three?" But, there was a note of enjoyment in it, as if he were telling a joke that Lavi didn't get, and his hands tangling in Lavi's hair while he used it. With a slightly forceful tug the Japanese man brought their lips together again.

The redhead pulled away early, groaning. "I told you that you'll be sore. And I'll sleep until noon. Besides," he cocked his head toward Kanda's left hand, "if we take the mission—"

Kanda made a strange face at him and lifted an eyebrow, his expression oddly like that of a feline toying with its prey. "Che. You don't listen, do you?"

"Sorry?"

Kanda pressed his hands to Lavi's shoulders and _shifted_ so that the redhead rolled under him, Kanda's hands still clamped in Lavi's mop of tousled red hair. He slipped upward, which was awkward and wet and cold for a moment before their bodies were touching again, his mouth on Lavi's throat. He painted a line of goosebumps down Lavi's chest with his breath, which followed back up again with his open mouth, licking and nipping and speaking between brushes of his lips. "I said shut up. If you're receiving, I won't be sore." His teeth found the center of Lavi's chest and he paused, looking up at the redhead with that same, predatory expression, eager and hungry and demanding all at once.

Lavi smirked. "I thought I was the sex fiend."

Kanda scowled at him, teeth bared for emphasis. "Doesn't mean I can't try, _baka Usagi_. Are we going to do this or not?"

"Do we have enough oil?"

-- -- --

**You like? Worth the wait? Gonna maim me?**


	26. Epilogue

**I have no excuse. Enjoy.**

– – –

Epilogue

Kanda lost count after four. It wasn't that after four orgasms he just couldn't count anymore, it was that after five, they all seemed to bleed together into one tired, vague memory that revolved mostly around Lavi and the different angles they could fit together without breaking bones or bed in the process. He forgot about everything else – the Order, Akuma, dying, hating the fact that Lavi was stupid and taller – and just tried to show how he felt and what he wanted, what he liked and what might have been better with practice. In the end, well after midnight, he found himself sweaty and sore in places he couldn't remember straining, and so tired he wasn't sure if he had been having sex or fighting a war against Lavi's body. Not that it mattered. He could still wrap his arms around Lavi's shoulders and cradle the redhead against his chest, bone-weary or not.

It didn't surprise him in the slightest when the once apprentice Bookman looked up at him and offered a lazy smile – one that he returned as best he could for the moment. It was odd how Lavi's smile changed without the eye patch: less crooked, more gentle, turned so both green eyes had to squint at its widest stage. It was going to take some getting used to.

"Yuu?"

"Yeah, me too."

The redhead frowned almost so that it was like a pout, but Kanda didn't let his expression change. It was getting easier to smile, as odd as it seemed. And it was Lavi's fault.

"I was going to say…" Lavi started again, still pouting. "That you look way too happy. It's creepy. You need to frown."

Kanda would have, but that he wasn't in the mood at all. Instead, he felt his lip lift over his teeth and his arms tightened a little on Lavi's chest. "Che. Moron," his voice dropped in volume without him meaning it to, "it's your fault."

Lavi turned his head a little to the side and his eyes caught the lamp light, which reflected oddly yellow against his emerald irises. It made his hair look coppery and soft, a bit stringy with sweat and maybe other things, most likely oil. He was still very nice to look at though, even if his lips were swollen and the dark circles beneath his eyes looked like bruises. "I know. I'm just not used to it, I guess. You look…" His smile turned mischievous, "I guess you look pretty, though it's not really the word I want." His fingers trailed a slow line across Kanda's bare right hip – not a suggestion, just a very personal expression of closeness. For Lavi, touching seemed almost habitual.

"And you're a moron. Oh, but that is the word I want. Shit."

"Jerk."

"_Your_ jerk."

The redhead paused, wide-eyed for a moment, before he narrowed his gaze and pulled himself a little higher on Kanda's pillow. He brushed his lips on the side of the Japanese man's, then leaned away, grinning. "I like that better than Cupcake, I think."

"Che." If he hadn't have been so tired, Kanda would have smacked Lavi upside the head for that, instead, he curled an arm around the redhead's shoulders and yanked them flush. "Shut up and sleep, moron."

"Can I shut up and… share space?"

The swordsman forced himself to frown. He doubted that Lavi knew what he was thinking – not at the moment – and found himself more than half-tempted to share. It wasn't like him, but it didn't matter. The night had been sequestered for him and the redhead, so what did it matter if he said something he wouldn't say in front of someone else?

Tenderly, Kanda turned himself enough to lie beside Lavi and look him straight in the face, his expression deadly serious. "Yes. Right now." He demanded without cracking, but only just.

Lavi shook his head a little, but didn't protest. "Okay, Cupcake."

He woke to knocking – again. So loud and pounding and irritating, he thought the fist had to be on the inside of his skull, throbbing behind his eyes. It wasn't until the redhead laying on his chest fumbled out of bed and pulled most the covers off with him that Kanda realized it was the door making that awful sound – and the sun was peeking in the window.

If not for his experience with the horrors of being a vampire, he likely would have hated the light at that moment. Instead, he detested it. The emotions we similar and yet very different; hate would have meant he wanted the thing to implode if it meant setting the room in darker light, detest meant he accepted that it was going to shine in the window all fucking day and he was going to want to glare at it. He would live with it though, even if it hurt his eyes a little. He could just keep them closed.

"Oh, my goodness, Lavi what happened to your neck?" Lenalee's voice sounded a bit pinched, filtering in from the doorway. "And why are you in—_Kanda-kun! _Oh! I'm sorry! My eyes! I just saw your—"

Lenalee's voice?

In a blur of motion that might have made a striking cobra jealous, the Japanese man leaped from his place on the mattress and fumbled with the nearest piece of clothing – a pair of pants that were baggy and a few inches too long when he pulled them on. He stumbled to the door and nearly shut it – because they were both indecent and Lenalee had just said something about seeing a part of him that was making her blush. He met her right eye through the space between door and door frame and tried, for the life in him, to frown.

"Why aren't you in that zombie town?" He demanded, and shifted when he heard Lavi drop his blankets and mumble something about it being too early. "And in front of my room…"

Lenalee, fully dressed and quite wakeful, did not seem capable of wrenching her eyes from the fly of the pants he was wearing. "Brother wanted to know if you two knew when _morning_ ended and afternoon began. Oh well… I'll tell him to send Crowley…"

"What time is it?"

"One thirty." She answered, still looking at his pants. Lavi's pants. The pants he had thrown on in a rush. "I'm here because Allen was ordered to bring us back so the science department can have a look at his eye, just in case. Um…" She swallowed and finally met his eyes, though her gaze flicked to his hair and then to his chest, and finally back down to his crotch. "I won't tell my brother if you won't."

He felt his face morph into a crooked, strange smile – like a smile but different than the ones he used on Lavi. "You're practically my relative. And I'm taken. He shouldn't care."

"Since when has logic stopped him?"

"Che. I won't talk."

Lenalee looked up again, her bangs resting lightly on her eyebrows, and smiled at him, genuinely. "Then I'll leave you to it!" She chimed and turned away, moving down the hall with a wave. "Lavi isn't a chew-toy, Kanda-kun! Be careful!"

He wasn't all that sure how to respond to that, so he just waved at her, wishing that the pants around his hips fit just a little better. When she disappeared around the next corner, Kanda turned back to his room with a small frown and closed the door behind him. She was nuts, that was all. And she had no idea how to respond to the great unknown thing that was sex.

"Yuu… come back…" Lavi was on the bed again, curled up lazily in a cocoon of blankets and sheets, hair messy and eyes sunken like he hadn't slept well. Instinct told Kanda that it was too late to go back to sleep, but the look on the redhead's face was too inviting and too tender; Lavi never made that expression for anyone else. And the missing eyepatch just made the whole thing more endearing. "Share space?"

With an un-amused expression, Kanda took off Lavi's pants and climbed up beside the redhead. Arms wound around his hips and draped the blankets over him while Lavi pressed his face into his side. It was a bit awkward to lie like that, if only because he couldn't see Lavi's expression. He understood it, still.

Lavi's right hand touched his chest, tracing a nonexistent pattern in the middle of his ribcage. Kanda felt himself relax.

"I've been meanin' to ask you," the redhead's fingers swept in a line before curving in a half circle. "I can't find the lotus. I remembered the hourglass and I found that, but there's nothing in it."

Kanda immediately sat up and looked to the corner of his room, to the flower he knew _had_ to be there, and blinked at the nine-petaled flower resting in the top of the glass. It was still there, right where he could see it. It was still dying. Just seeing it was enough to quell the rush of panic that wanted to fill Kanda's gut. Because he needed that flower. If it was gone… if it was gone…if he had run out of time... even if he had Lavi...

"See? There's nothing there at all." Lavi chimed with a curious note in his voice. The redheaded boy was sitting up beside him and sliding off the bed, taking the sheet with him like a toga. Kanda watched in abject horror as the green-eyed Exorcist first walked to the table and then – before there could be even a word of protest – touched the hourglass with decidedly gentle fingers. Lavi traced down the side of it and then back to the top, back to the rusted little latch that no one saw, which he turned without pause. The redhead was crazy. The flower was right there, bobbing with the motions of Lavi's hands.

"Stop it."

Lavi didn't hear him.

The top opened, swinging back on a hinge toward the wall. "Not even a petal. It's just…" Lavi started to put his hand inside, nonchalant, completely unaware that if he touched it, if he knocked off even a petal—

Kanda didn't think about how Lavi might react to him – he thought about not wanting to die. He leaped up and caught the redhead's wrist, pushing him away from the table, away from the flower, but the sheet didn't follow so easily. The white material tangled around Lavi's naked legs and he tumbled, dragging Kanda and the three-legged table down with him.

The sound of breaking glass had never had that tone before, never rang like a funeral bell. The floor had never been as cold as it was in the moment that Kanda's left arm slammed into it, all of his weight and all of Lavi's behind it. He felt something shift and heard something _snap_ before searing, stabbing pain shot up into his shoulder. Not that it mattered. Whatever joke Lavi was playing was a lie. Kanda was dead. It was only a matter of time before every wound, every gun shot, every broken bone came back at him with a vengeance. The spell would be broken. The lotus would die.

But for now, the only thing that hurt was his arm, and that was screaming in agony.

"Shit! You're bleeding!" Lavi's voice alerted him to the fact that, despite that he was dead, he was lying on the floor with his eyes shut. "And what the fuck are you _leaping_ at me for? It's just an… was just an old hourglass. Shoulda told me not to touch it if…"

Kanda stopped listening. It didn't matter. He didn't want his last memory of Lavi to be him whining about something useless.

"Hey, Yuu," Lavi's hands rolled him onto his back, which jarred his left arm to the point that his head felt light from the pain. It wasn't healing. He was going to die. "Did I just… did you see a lotus in the hourglass?"

Because that was obviously not the tone Lavi used when telling a joke, and he hurt too much to be dead, Kanda opened his eyes a little, looking out of them unsure what he would see. His right eye didn't see anything and it felt sticky, but the left showed him Lavi's worried face, eyebrows pinched together in the center of his forehead.

"Why aren't I dead?" The thought was out of his mouth before he could stop it.

"Huh?" Was Lavi's eloquent reply.

"The flower. You killed the flower. I'm dead."

Lavi blinked at him, frowning. "There was no flower, Yuu-chan. There _is_ no flower. You've got a swollen arm and a cut on your forehead and a big pile of broken glass, but there's no lotus anywhere."

That didn't make sense. But a lot of things didn't make sense. It was _impossible_ for the flower to not change after what he had been through, right? And yet it hadn't. And now, the flower was out of the glass, the glass was broken on the floor, and Kanda was breathing. That was impossible too, right? And yet…

Kanda reached up with his right hand – which had a small cut across the back – and touched the side of Lavi's face. It didn't make any sense at all, unless there hadn't been a flower. But how could that have been? It was as real as Lavi was, wasn't it? And yet, as he traced the line of Lavi's jaw and pushed himself up to sitting, he knew that he hadn't expected to die, not with all of himself. The things that had happened were too impossible.

His dark eyes moved from his lover to the shattered remains of the only personal possession he had anymore, and locked on the lump of flower petals he still saw amid the debris. Unscathed, blooming with all of the life of a complete lotus. That didn't make any sense either.

"What the fuck is going on?" Kanda breathed, and pulled his hand away to reach for the flower in front of him. He was afraid to touch it, because if he did – and he _felt_ it – what would happen then? It couldn't be there and not there. It couldn't be that unreal and real at once. But he couldn't be dead and breathing, could he?

"You see a flower, don't you?"

"Yes."

Lavi arms tightened around him, pulling him away from the lotus. "There's only glass there, you'll cut your hand if you—"

Kanda pushed his lover's hand away, and refused to move his eyes from the flower. "I don't care what you see, I need to try to touch it."

"Yuu…"

The swordsman pressed his fingers to the very place he saw those soft, delicate pink petals against the harsh stone floor. It felt like glass. He cut himself. It wasn't real. Even if the flower bent at the brush of his fingers, it wasn't real. Kanda shut his eyes and pulled back his hand, trying to work the situation through his mind again, trying to figure the exact moment when the spell had started to act strangely. If he could pinpoint the moment, he might be able to discover what had changed.

Lavi's hand ran gently across his forehead, smoothing away his bangs. He felt his lips twitch in something like a smile.

"Will you please tell me what's going on?"

Kanda sighed softly, but didn't open his eyes. "As soon as I figure it out for myself."

It was only about an hour before Kanda's arm was just as healthy as it had always been, which was something Komui deemed incomprehensible. Lavi, being how he had found himself to be, thought it a blessing. What did he care _why_ Kanda was healing despite the state of the thing that supposedly kept him alive? It was good that he was healing. It was good that they wouldn't have to be careful of his arm for the next few days or the next few missions or the next few years.

Thus, while Komui sat behind his desk and tried to not look as lost as Kanda, Lavi doodled lines in the margins of an undoubtedly important paper, all of them swoops and curves that reminded him of a certain samurai's ponytail. It wasn't that he wasn't worried. He was very worried. It hadn't been a day since he'd given himself over to the thought of _forever_, and the idea of it – of being who he was, of having friends and loved ones and a _home_ – hadn't quite sunken in yet, and Lavi truly did not want to lose it.

He didn't want to lose Kanda.

"What do you mean it _might_ have been the mist-girl's Innocence?" Kanda was leaning on Komui's desk, glaring daggers, growling his questions. Really, it was understandable, but he could use a cold drink. Or a back massage. Lavi was up for the second one, at least. "I don't want _might;_ I want to know what the fuck is going _on_ here!"

The scientist in front of the swordsman sighed and shook his head, looking somewhat less than amused. "The way I understand it…" Komui held up his hands in an expression of helplessness. "There never was a flower. What it means if you say that it's gone..."

Kanda started to growl low in his throat, but didn't argue.

"This makes me think that something has been rewritten within the pattern of the spell itself. I'm not a magician," Komui let his hands fall a little, as if the movement might back the younger man leaning over him down a little. It didn't work. "How that happened… _who_ could do something like that… I don't know. I could run a few tests if you'd like, have a look at Mugen, but I honestly don't know what I'll find."

Lavi thought he had produced a pretty good ponytail and looked up from it, frowning slightly. "Ne, Yuu-chan," he turned his pencil over, letting a thoughtful expression come over his face. "You think _I'm_ special enough to love you into immortality?"

"No. Go… do something painful if you aren't going to help."

The redhead had to smile to himself and sigh. Of course it couldn't be that simple. Or cheesy. It had to be something complicated, Lavi was sure.

"I'll run some tests." Komui said again, trying to look cheerful. "Please try not to worry. But Lavi," he waved a quill in a way that would have been very irritating if Lavi were still part cat, "please keep an eye on him. Just in case."

Kanda drew into himself for the remainder of the day, brooding in a silent, violent sort of way, angry and frightened and terrible at conveying both at once. It was his aura of killing intent and his astoundingly hard glares that made Lavi want to pin the swordsman to a wall and make him forget everything that had happened, everything that _could_ happen, given time. He got his chance just before lunch and missed it at sword point – a threat he hadn't missed in the last month or so of his life.

Still, while Lavi watched Kanda go through sword techniques and counted the different stances and forms and marveled at them, it all seemed rather strange and pointless. Kanda was somehow better than everyone else – he healed, he fought, he followed orders – and it went beyond what Lavi understood to be the powers of a simple spell. In fact, the more he thought about it, the less it made sense that Kanda would _die_ from the loss of the flower. If he and it were tied together in life and death, then why not use something less likely to fall apart? Like a hunk of metal?

Strange and pointless, he knew, and watched the sunlight reflect silver from Mugen's edge.

"Oi, Yuu-chan." Lavi chimed almost playfully from beneath the shade of his pine tree, shifting so the book he wasn't reading didn't touch the ground but instead rested on his knees. When the swordsman didn't stop moving he went on, speaking in a conversational tone. "I think we shouldn't worry about it to much, you know? I mean… it's like…" He cast about for something he could compare it to, something that wasn't Yuu's clothes, at least. "Karma. It only matters if you think about it."

His lover offered him a raised eyebrow without turning his head. Perhaps it was a cue to go on.

"Seriously. We're all going to die. If you worry about it, you'll give yourself high blood pressure. Same with karma. If you think too hard about it, you fuck it up."

"Che." Kanda didn't quite shake his head, but the motion was in his thoughts. It was enough for Lavi to catch it. "That isn't how it works at all, idiot. There are two different kind of it." Mugen sliced downward at an angle that would have been perfect for cutting the head from an enemy – it only caught a leaf and destroyed it. "What you're thinking is… I forget the name. There's earthly karma and karma that has nothing to do with what you say or think or suffer though. Divine karma."

Lavi sat, silently, and listened, completely at a loss. Even if he knew Yuu, and loved Yuu, and thought he understood Yuu, he hadn't the slightest clue that the guy knew so much about Hinduism (or perhaps it was Buddhism?). At all. Religion was about the second to last thing on his mind when it came to their relationship, really.

"_Sdmsdrika karma_. _Alma karma."_ Kanda went on in a soft voice. "One to tie a person to the world and the other to cut him away from it."

The redhead watched tension go all the way up his lover's spine and then down again, making his movements more mechanical.

"_Sadhana._ Che. What a fucking joke."

"Yuu?"

Mugen stopped mid-movement and Kanda looked at him wide-eyed, as if he had forgotten that Lavi was there. He didn't say anything. He simply lowered his sword and turned his eyes toward it, then toward the ground, before they finally came to Lavi once more. "Dying isn't anything like karma." He finished softly, but there was something behind his eyes – something that made Lavi wonder what kind of joke _sadhana _was.

'_A means by which to accomplish something,'_ was the translation that came to mind. Somehow it fit better than it did in a religious context.

Lavi tried not to think about it.

"Okay." The redhead agreed softly. "It's not like dying."

Kanda did something strange then and teetered for a moment before he sheathed his sword and turned away, looking up at the pale winter sky. The light turned bluish white on his hair and cold silver on his eyes, carving his shape out of ice, lacing him with frost. It wasn't that cold now, though most of the snow hadn't melted. They were close to spring now, even if it wasn't really about to start in England for another few months.

The swordsman didn't seem to see any of it.

"I don't want to go looking anymore, I can't." Kanda whispered at the clouds, distant and soft, just like his voice. "But I don't know when that started. And I don't know _why_. And I don't know who or what could have changed the spell form, like Komui said. I don't want to die." He scoffed a laugh, low and thoughtful, and lifted his lips in a half-grin. "It's the first time in my life that I really give a damn about living for something _good_…"

Lavi pushed himself from his place beneath the tree and tromped across the dead-leaf-and-snow ground to his lover's back, a little thankful that the swordsman didn't turn to look at him. With careful thought on where Mugen was at the moment, Lavi draped an arm around Kanda's chest and pulled him back, burying his cold face in the long-haired man's neck. "You'll be fine, Yuu-chan. I just know you will. Even if I don't know why and you don't know why… I mean… it'll be okay. Right?" The words had been meant to be reassuring, and they hadn't done their job at all.

Still, when Kanda turned, there was a little light of hope burning behind his eyes. "Yeah." It was a one-word preamble to a kiss that might have been crooked if Kanda hadn't have turned to face the redhead. The kiss lead to another and another, the most contact they had had since morning, until Lavi found himself pulling his lover back to his tree and down into the snow, Mugen and the book forgotten. "It'll be fine." Kanda growled, and then his icy cold hands were sliding inside Lavi's coat and dancing across his chest.

With a shudder and a grab at Kanda's hair, Lavi prayed it was so.

Lenalee could only smirk at the two of them, at Lavi and his muddy hair, at Kanda's pine needle covered bangs, at the wet spots on their clothes, and the state of both of their boots. Really, the two of them wouldn't have been more obvious if they smelled like hay instead of dirt and sweat – and that was saying something. At least, when she raised a suggestive eyebrow at Lavi, the redhead turned his eyes at Kanda and licked his teeth a little. It was good that they were that close, somehow. And it was good that Kanda-kun had found it in him to sit down to an early dinner, because he seemed ravenous, and less worried. Still, Lenalee had never seen him eat more than one tray of soba and tempura, and this time he had two – as well as a small side of blood pudding, whatever that was. It made her smile to watch him eating across from Lavi, slathering his noodles in wasabi just so the redhead would squirm.

They were both doing better than they had been. They were both opened up, even if it was only to each other.

And even though Kanda seemed to be worrying about something, Lavi seemed more than set on making him forget. It was…cute. And Lenalee didn't mean boy-kissing-boy cute, she meant cute like a small fuzzy animal trying to warm up to an angry rhinoceros and actually managing to make a large, leathery friend. Or maybe it was cute because Lenalee knew exactly what was wrong and that it couldn't be fixed, but Lavi was hell-bent on trying.

In any case, it was painfully obvious when Kanda-kun touched Lavi's face that he didn't want to be in the cafeteria where he couldn't lean in and do dirty, horrible things to the redhead. Lenalee almost let herself do more than smile.

She would have liked to watch more, to silently stalk the two of them until she spotted them in a corner, or saw a meaningful grab of someone's ass. It wasn't meant to be, however. Reever burst into the cafeteria only just as Kanda was standing up to take his tray, an expectant, desperate look on the scientist's face, something that might have been excitement in his eyes. He didn't speak above a whisper, and she watched Kanda and Lavi leave with him at a brisk walk.

Lenalee hoped it wasn't anything having to do with a mission.

"So it's that Olga's fault!"

"Ursa, Yuu. Ursa."

Kanda might have been murderous, but he wasn't doing a very good job of radiating threat at the moment. Maybe it was the fact that his hair was still all sexy and filled with twigs, Lavi didn't know, but he was failing at his glares, too. Perhaps, under it all, he was thankful for what had happened. Or maybe he didn't know how to feel.

"Her fucking leech powers did what to me?" Yuu demanded again, clenching his katana's hilt with a harsh glare. "And you better _explain_ it this time, Komui, or I'll cut it out of your _brain_ so I can see it_._"

The scientist in question held up his hands, something like a strained smile on his lips. The Chinese man didn't seem half as stressed as he had been, though the way he waved his fingers in front of his face spoke volumes on his thoughts of the swordsman's threat. "It isn't that complicated, Kanda, all you have to do is listen to me." He gestured broadly, which moved his right hand away from his skull for a moment before it moved back again. A feeble meat-shield at the most. "What I'm telling you is that there was never a lotus flower." His eyes wandered to Lavi before they wandered back to Kanda. "The woman from your... memories..." His gaze went to Lavi again before he cleared his throat. "I believe that the flower was a self-designed timer – a thing created from your own mind that kept you looking for the woman you thought that you loved." Komui gestured at Lavi, though he did not look at the redhead again. "It seems possible to me that, now that you have found Lavi, the time has reset itself – or become irrelevant. What that means for your lifespan, I do not know, however—"

"So I'm not… dying anymore." Kanda whispered under his breath, his eyes somehow hurt and yet focused very much on the room around him. "I'm something else."

"Kanda…"

"It's something that comes from not being human any more, isn't it?"

Lavi tensed. "Yuu…"

The Japanese boy looked up at him, his face drawn into something like a smile, but it was the sort of smile that only Lavi would see. It suddenly didn't matter that they were standing in Komui's office, just the three of them, nor did it matter that Lavi didn't understand completely what was going on. He'd never heard anything about a woman that Kanda loved. It mattered that Yuu was hurting and he wasn't about to die, Lavi didn't think. That was all he needed to know.

Komui made a startled, though completely neutral sound when the redhead leaned in and laid his lips on the swordsman's parted ones. It was a brief kiss, just a little promise, but it brought a blush to the Asian man's cheeks all the same.

"Don't say stupid things, Yuu-chan." Lavi whispered just loud enough for the three of them to possibly hear. "You aren't a freak or a monster, okay?"

"Shut up, Lavi."

The redhead shook his head a little and shamelessly put his hand on top of the swordsman's, squeezing it as harshly as he could without worrying about soreness. They couldn't be too close, he didn't think, and Yuu wasn't about to make him think otherwise. "I mean… whatever happened… it's a good thing, right? Ursa made us both go a little bonkers and now Yuu-chan's indestructible?" As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Lavi felt a little like he was stupid. He could see in his lover's face – even without thinking of his right eye – that there was a lot more to it than that, a lot of unpleasantness, but he didn't need anymore detail than he already had.

Komui folded his hands on his desk – a movement that Lavi just barely caught out of the corner of his vision. "That is more or less what seems to have happened. The momentary repression of his healing abilities might have occurred due to the changes taking place within Kanda's mind, rather than the changes in his physiology. There's only one question that I can think to ask that might prove me right or wrong is…" He paused as if for dramatic effect – something that made Kanda tense as if to hit him. "Has your diet changed since you were changed by Ursa?"

"What?" Yuu blinked. "How did you know?"

Lavi felt his expression start to falter. "What does Yuu's new interest in English sausage have to do with anything?" There was a pause in which Komui bit his lower lip and Kanda narrowed his eyes at Lavi. Maybe they both thought he meant Allen rather than blood pudding. Maybe they were both completely nuts.

Yuu cleared his throat and yanked his hand out of Lavi's as if burned. "What _does_ blood pudding have to do with any of this?"

"Everything and nothing." Komui answered smoothly. "If you stop eating it, nothing will happen – however, the fact that you are _willing_ to eat it proves to me that something has changed. As far as I can tell… without running more psychological work… you haven't regained the life that you lost as much as you have revitalized what you had left through thought.. It's a complicated idea, but what it comes down to is simply that you, the very basic persona that you have kept up for the last nine years, who thrived on only Asian foods—"

"I get it." Kanda cut him off, breathing in a deep, slow breath and sighing it out. He had taken to rubbing the fingers that Lavi had once been holding on to, as if they might hurt just a little. Maybe they did. Lavi didn't think he had been squeezing those soft, bony fingers that hard, though. "Then... what do I do about the lotus?" Yuu's voice was calm and flat. It didn't hide his fear, however.

Komui shrugged. "The flower was never real to anyone else, Kanda. If something's wrong with it, maybe you should ask yourself why."

The swordsman didn't look up from his fingers. "How will I know if I'm going to die?"

"You won't." Lavi blurted softly, and immediately regretted it. He felt stupid and ignorant without even finishing the thought, but it was too late to stop now. "You'll just have to live like the rest of us, without knowing."

Yuu frowned, but it wasn't the kind of frown that it could have been – it was thoughtful and understanding and almost remorseful. It fit almost too well with his eyes and the light and the delicious curve of his nose. Lavi wanted to reach out and touch him again, but that he liked his fingers. The frown eased into a mirthless little smile. "Che. Whatever. I never liked knowing anyway. Komui," his head almost snapped upward when he looked at the scientist, determined as he had ever been. "The house that was eating Finders – was it the only mission today?"

Komui shook his head, brow furrowed. "I was going to send Miranda and Crowley to a villa in southern Europe. No one lives in it, but things appear to move on their own, the lights turn on and off – without explanation. Since the two of you were so painfully late this morning, I was thinking I might give you a few more days to—"

"We'll take it." Lavi and Yuu said at once, then glanced at each other sidelong before looking back at their supervisor.

"I'm not dying. I shouldn't stay here." Kanda went on.

"And if we stay here much longer we're going to get caught." Lavi added with a brisk nod.

With a sigh and a slow, easing up on his chair, Komui looked between the two of them. He was making a face like he hadn't expected things to go so well, and now that they had, he wasn't sure what to do about it. It was an accepting expression. Yet, the crinkles at the edges of his eyes were sad, somehow, and the way he tilted his face into his left hand made his glasses shine light in that irritating way that blocked his eyes from sight. "Well, all things considered, I kind of want to keep you both here until I run a few more tests, but…" His shoulders lifted in a half-shrug. "I can't hold you back. I shouldn't. I'll have packets ready for you in an hour. Until then, pack."

The two of them nodded as one, and a quick, honest smile flashed across Lavi's mouth, showing all of his teeth.

"You know, Yuu…" He said as they turned toward the door, his voice lifting in a tone that suggested more than just a smile on his face. "We can pretend you're dying, if you'd like to share with me your last request."

"Che. Right." Kanda answered, completely deadpan. "Please kiss me, before I die from a lack of retarded."

**If you didn't get it...**

**Message me. I shall explain it to you. Otherwise, I hope you liked it. Sorry for the wait...**


End file.
